One Year After the Ferguson Protests, Just a Few Reforms Have Succeededhttps://www.thenation.com/article/one-year-after-the-ferguson-protests-just-a-few-reforms-have-succeeded/Steven HsiehAug 10, 2015

FERGUSON, Mo.—On a humid Sunday morning, hundreds crowded around a makeshift memorial on Canfield Drive, a pile of flowers and stuffed animals soaked by an evening of rain. They gathered to remember and to hear the words of community leaders, poets and a grieving father. Right around 12:02 PM, the crowd observed four and a half minutes of silence before walking en masse to a nearby church.

Exactly one year ago, on this same stretch of suburban road, Michael Brown’s body lay on the pavement for four and a half hours. Crowds gathered. Protests erupted. A convenience store went up in flames. Police arrived on the scene with armored vehicles, dogs and tear gas canisters. Camera crews from CNN, Al Jazeera and the BBC followed suit. Months later, when a grand jury found police officer Darren Wilson justified in the shooting, the scene repeated itself with more fury and fire.

Within days, a small municipality nestled in North St. Louis County’s suburban sprawl became center stage for bubbled-over racial strife in America. Words like use-of-force, body camera, police militarization and municipal court all vaulted into the national lexicon. A burgeoning movement rallied around the common sense, yet somehow controversial, demand that Black Lives Matter. Young activists kept up the pressure in St. Louis. And when black men and women died in police shootings or police custody in other parts of the country—Cleveland, North Charleston, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Waller County, and Arlington—the names of the deceased became impossible to ignore.

After night fell in Ferguson on Sunday, a day of peaceful remembrance ended in violence. Official reports say officers returned fire at an 18-year-old, critically wounding him, after he fired shots at a police SUV. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the shooter, Tyrone Harris, is in critical condition.

Despite last night’s violence, the weekend of marches and memorials offered community members time to reflect on the year in which Ferguson became an international symbol. Residents, protesters, and officials who spoke with The Nation expressed a range of views, from ambivalence to hope, about whether Michael Brown’s death brought forth positive change.

“I hate that it had to come to this for change, but the police have changed. They don’t even stop me anymore,” said Ryan Walls, 29, standing feet away from the spot where Brown died. Walls works as a cook at Busch Stadium, which was one of many public destinations in St. Louis that saw Black Lives Matter protests this year.

“Somehow, the police have got to come out and interact with the community. Actions speak louder than words,” said Aaron Durgins, 37. Durgins pointed to an empty lot, the previous location of a burned QuickTrip, where the Urban League, a local non-profit, plans to build a jobs center. “That’s going to be perfect. We just got to get people to go.”

Others residents feel that progress has eluded their community. Amir Chambers, a 25-year-old freelance graphics designer and rap artist, told The Nation, “Nothing’s changed. The police still harass us. I was called a [n-word] by an officer three months ago.”

After the Justice Department released a scathing report of Ferguson’s police and municipal court practices, its city manager, judge and police chief all resigned. Wesley Bell, one of Ferguson’s two newly elected black council members, said the acting officials who have filled those vacancies have already worked on correcting some of the practices that fell under heavy scrutiny last year. The Los Angeles Timesreported fines in Ferguson are down as much as 60 percent from last year.

In their report, Justice Department investigators verified what many residents already suspected: Ferguson police acted as de-facto revenue collectors, disproportionately burdening black residents with citations. Under pressure from city officials, aggressive policing and excessive ticketing was norm. Other reportsshowed how this problem also afflicted neighboring municipalities in North St. Louis County, not just Ferguson.

Missouri Governor Jay Nixon signed a bill to curb some of the draconian practices in the region’s municipal courts. Starting August 28, revenue from traffic fines for St. Louis County municipalities cannot surpass 12.5 percent; the rest of Missouri will be capped at 20 percent. The reforms will also limit fines and court costs from traffic tickets to $300 and ban the practice of jailing those unable to pay.

Other attempts to address problems revealed by Ferguson have not been as successful. Missouri lawmakers filed more than sixty bills inspired by last year’s protests, but only court reform passed into law, according to an Associated Press analysis. One of the bills that failed to move through the statehouse sought to make Missouri’s use-of-force laws compliant with a 1985 US Supreme Court decision. Other bills would have made body cameras mandatory and require special prosecutors to investigate officer-involved shootings. Last year, activists accused county prosecutor Bob McCulloch of being too close to law enforcement to objectively handle Wilson’s case.

“Court reform is low-hanging fruit. You should have done that shit a long time ago,” said State Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal, whose district includes Ferguson. “When [the Joplin tornado] happened, everybody stopped in their tracks to help Joplin out. You have an entire region of oppressed people, and you have Democrats and Republicans doing practically nothing.”

Nixon convened a 16-member commission to identify and study the social conditions underlying last year’s unrest. In a report slated for release next month, the Ferguson Commission will make recommendations to tackle structural inequality in St. Louis, from civilian oversight boards to a $15 minimum wage. Brittany Packnett, an activist and commission member, told The Nation that the group’s effort should be seen as proof that protests work.

“The purpose of protest is to force conversation that brings about negotiation that brings about change. People in marginalized communities know our issues aren’t put on the agenda unless we force it,” said Packnett, who also serves as Executive Director for the St. Louis branch of Teach For America. “I think we’ve seen people participate in a way to know that that kind of pressure has been successful.”

Since last year’s shooting, droves of residents moved away from the neighborhood where Michael Brown died. But Wanda Edwards, 58, couldn’t afford to leave. On Saturday afternoon, Edwards watched from her porch as protesters gathered around Michael Brown’s memorial for a five-mile march to Normandy High School, where he had graduated just days before his death. Edwards still remembers the exact moment, one year ago, when she walked to this same spot, facing the road, and saw Michael Brown’s body on the street.

]]>https://www.thenation.com/article/one-year-after-the-ferguson-protests-just-a-few-reforms-have-succeeded/After #Fergusonhttps://www.thenation.com/article/after-ferguson/Steven Hsieh,Steven Hsieh,Raven RakiaOct 8, 2014The protests that followed the police shooting of Michael Brown created a network of youth in revolt.
]]>

When Darren Wilson, a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, shot and killed Michael Brown on August 9, King D. Seals, age 27, was at the crime scene within the hour. He lives just a few blocks away from Canfield Green, the predominantly black apartment complex where the unarmed teenager was shot. He saw Brown’s body, which would lie on the street for an additional three hours. “It wasn’t even a protest yet,” Seals said about the gathering when he first arrived. “It was a black boy being shot in the community. It was about ten other women and men out there, and the family.” The next day, members of the community passed around a large plastic bag for donations to Brown’s family. Seals put in $100; others donated $50, $20, whatever they could. By the end of the day, the bag was filled with money. “Before it became a riot, before it became a protest, it was just the community coming together,” Seals said.

On the second night, there was a protest on West Florissant Avenue, and the St. Louis County police met it with armored vehicles, M-4 rifles and riot gear. Officer Wilson remained unidentified and unarraigned, even as protesters called for his arrest. During the first week, a few demonstrators resorted to property damage to air their grievances. Seals remained on the front lines through the height of the police crackdown—and not for the first time. Last year, he protested when Cary Ball Jr. was fatally shot twenty-one times by police officers in St. Louis City. He is still in contact with Ball’s mother. Recalling the differences between last year’s demonstrations and this year’s, Seals said that the protests in the wake of Brown’s death were more effective. After Ball was killed, “we did everything positive; we did everything peaceful…I feel like [the Ball protest] is a prime example that when you do things quote-unquote ‘the right way,’ you don’t get any results.” The internal police investigation later declared the shooting of Ball justified.

The outcome of last year’s protests left Seals distrustful of community leaders like Antonio French, a Ferguson alderman, and the clergy in St. Louis, who have urged a voter-registration campaign in the wake of the recent protests. After watching politician after politician come and go without any improvement in the communities he’s grown up in, Seals is skeptical that voting will solve the many problems plaguing the area, especially the poverty and systemic racism—problems he knows all too well from mentoring local kids, “the same people out there fighting and putting their lives on the line every day [at the protests]. The same kids that are written off as thugs and criminals and nothing.”

Since the protests began, a few people have started to call him and several friends the “Ferguson Freedom Fighters.” Moving forward, Seals hopes to improve economic security for the black community in Ferguson. Although the city’s resident population is about 67 percent black, the majority of businesses there (55 percent) are white-owned. Seals plans to create a T-shirt print shop that would provide local black youth with jobs. “We don’t need leadership; we need ownership,” he said. “We need black-owned businesses in the black community. We need a whole different system; we don’t need a different person in the [existing] system.”

Seals recalls getting harassed by police ever since he was old enough to leave the house alone. “It’s like South Africa apartheid out here,” he said. “Why [are] all these white people controlling these black communities?”

* * *

The Ferguson Freedom Fighters were not the only ad hoc group to form in the crucible of the Michael Brown protests. Marching for justice during the day, and running through clouds of tear gas by night, young protesters bonded and shared ideas. Cliques formed, occasionally along the lines of common interest or social class, but more often by happenstance: the Lost Voices, the Millennial Activists United and Hands Up United. When the protests slowed, these groups stayed in touch. They held strategy meetings in churches and schools, attended training sessions by national organizations, made T-shirts and solicited donations. They have shifted the political culture in the city, and their goals, as they develop, will be crucial to its future.

This new generation of protesters represents a marked break with the older generations of black leaders in the city. They disagreed with the tactics of the civic leaders and clergy members who, for example, urged protesters to obey police curfews widely viewed by the young people as disrespectful of the community’s legitimate outrage. Most of these older leaders already had a stake in the political process in St. Louis through nonprofits or as politicians. National figures like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson were treated with similar skepticism. Jackson was booed at a rally when he asked for donations. Resisting co-optation, the majority of St. Louis’s young protesters took matters into their own hands. As Dr. Reynaldo Anderson, assistant professor of the humanities at Harris-Stowe State University, told The Nation, the protesters “are not interested in hearing what the establishment has to say. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to go off in the other direction and listen to what the old-line…black nationalists have to say either. I suspect they’ll come up with someone quite unique, [someone] that is empowering to them in their community but still has the ability to cooperate with people who are not members of the community.”

The young activists have not, however, ruled out help from outside groups offering training and expertise. Activist icons like Harry Belafonte and Cornel West held a number of calls with them, offering counsel and encouragement. “What’s happening in Ferguson right now is young black folks deciding they have the ability within them and the power within them to change the conditions in which they live,” said Charlene Carruthers, national coordinator of the Black Youth Project 100, who traveled to Ferguson to teach St. Louis’s newly activated youth how to organize and win campaigns. Much as the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 galvanized national organizations like BYP100 and the Dream Defenders, Brown’s death awakened many of St. Louis’s youth. “In Ferguson, we’re going to continue to do that work in helping them build capacity specifically among young black people,” Carruthers said. “So making sure they have the training and also the critical analysis, [that’s] how we put those things together and turn [them] into transformation in our communities.”

* * *

“Our work is in the beginning stages of going national,” said Ferguson activist Taurean Russell. “People are seeing we have political power, and you also have power of the people. People are willing to put their bodies on the line.” Russell works with Hands Up United, a new coalition that includes the Organization for Black Struggle and Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, two longstanding groups dedicated to combating injustice and inequality.

“I had never protested, marched or anything like that before,” Russell recalled. “Then I saw that body lying out there for four hours and said, ‘That could have been me.’” He remembered turning off his TV and driving down to the scene of the shooting that afternoon, where a crowd had already gathered. Russell tweeted out a call to action and joined a group of eight other first responders. They marched to the Ferguson Police Department to get answers.

Two weeks after the shooting, Russell, along with local rapper Tef Poe and activist Jeffery Hill Jr., held a press conference to unveil a list of demands. Seated before the gathered members of the local and national media, they called for the immediate arrest of Officer Wilson, the removal of St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch from the case, a federal civil-rights investigation of north St. Louis County’s police departments, and the firing of Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson. This was the first time the trio spoke under the banner of Hands Up United, which has become one of the more visible forces in the ongoing search for justice in Ferguson. Russell and his colleagues are still leading efforts to register voters, train activists and organize further actions.

Hands Up United was joined in the protests by Millennial Activists United, a group made up of nine students and recent grads who were initially more focused on documenting the events. MAU’s members—five women and four men—met through Twitter during the early days of the protests on West Florissant Avenue. They quickly developed a tight-knit community, sustained by their addiction to social media. Together, they live-tweeted, Vined and Instagrammed every protest, through the sweltering days and tumultuous nights, as well as the direct actions taking place elsewhere in the St. Louis area. Their follower counts skyrocketed.

In the beginning, the members of MAU played a mostly supporting role in the protests, while producing a steady stream of tweets. They’d offer rides to people who wanted to attend the protests but didn’t have the means. They’d take part in direct actions called by existing grassroots organizations. During one of these rallies, a demonstration outside the building that houses Governor Jay Nixon’s St. Louis office, 28-year-old Larry Fellows—one of the nine members of what would become Millennial Activists United—was arrested and charged with failure to disperse. After this, the group became a cornerstone of the Ferguson protests.

There was just one problem. “People kept asking us who we were with: ‘What organization do you work for?’” Fellows recalled. “We couldn’t answer them. That was how all that came about. We didn’t really have a name until September.”

These days, MAU has decided to put its efforts toward political education. “There needs to be something in place where people that want to run for office in their own communities can be well prepared and well equipped to do so,” said Brittany Ferrell, a 25-year-old student and Millennial Activist. “If they understood the power in that, they could cause a shift in a major way.” The first step was to hold weekly Twitter discussions under the hashtag #FergusonFriday, which continue to this day.

Johnetta Elzie, another 25-year-old student and MAU member, traces the group’s role to a larger national movement to defend the lives of young black men. “We saw it with Trayvon Martin. We saw it with Jordan Davis—but I always felt away from everything. Then I saw Brown’s body laying out there, and I said, ‘Damn, they did it again!’ But now that it happened in my home, I’m not just going to tweet about it from the comfort of my bed. So I went down there. You could still see the bloodstains deeply and darkly in the streets after they moved his body.”

* * *

Not all of the young activists have rejected the older generation’s call for a focus on voter registration in Ferguson’s black community. Jazminique Holley was just 8 when her godfather, a 26-year-old black man, was shot and killed by the St. Louis Police. He was unarmed. “I remember we were marching,” she recalls. “We chanted ‘No justice, no peace!’ in Pine Lawn, but we never got justice.”

Years later, Holley, now 24 and in her last year at Harris-Stowe State University, finds herself organizing around the killing of Michael Brown. The president of the university’s NAACP chapter, Holley led a canned-good food drop-off in Canfield Green and organized cleanup crews during the day. Although she would often leave before the heavy police presence at night, she didn’t distance herself from some of the other nightly protesters. “I think we all want the same thing, which is for justice to be served. I think we are all going about it differently,” she said. “They’re hurting. [Some] are just expressing themselves in a more aggressive way…but I can’t say the way they expressed themselves was the wrong way.”

On August 17, she organized a panel discussion at Harris-Stowe titled “Truth Has No Color.” The guests included Jesse Jackson and retired judge Greg Mathis, along with several young or student organizers who had been active in Ferguson. She hopes to do another panel focused on healing. “We need to heal those wounds first,” she told The Nation. As for long-term solutions, Holley believes that voter registration and education will prove to be an effective strategy. “We need to vote in elected officials who like or respect us African-Americans—and in some cases, we need people who look like us,” she said. “You can’t respect people who don’t understand your struggle.”

* * *

Along with refocusing the national spotlight on America’s race problem, the Ferguson protesters can already claim at least two other victories. On September 4, the Justice Department launched a probe of the Ferguson Police Department to determine whether its officers engaged in a pattern of civil-rights violations—a mere rung below Hands Up United’s demand for a countywide investigation. Four days later, the Ferguson City Council announced a set of proposals in response to the protests, including a reduction of the municipality’s crippling ticket fees, which had come under intense national scrutiny, and the establishment of a civilian review board to monitor police activities. Still, even with this progress, don’t expect Ferguson to fade away anytime soon. More than 3,000 residents have registered to vote in the next election.

As the national media turned their attention elsewhere, a group of young activists calling themselves the Lost Voices rose to prominence. Its members, ages 15 to 26, staked out a campsite behind a barbecue joint at the corner of Canfield and West Florissant, where they slept for weeks. Community members and fellow activists, inspired by their dedication, donated tents, food and other essentials, as well as a basketball hoop. The ten activists took to the streets every night at 7 pm to march and chant, encouraging others to join. “If people riding on the street see us every day, it’s going to make a difference,” said Cheyenne Green, a 21-year-old resident of neighboring Dellwood. It didn’t take long for others to rally behind the Lost Voices’ enthusiasm.

When the police dismantled the activists’ campsite, forcefully arresting two in the process, outrage ensued. Hands Up United posted a video of the raid on its website. Members of MAU tweeted their support. Although the many emergent activist groups in Ferguson vary in their tactics, it is clear that they see themselves fighting for a common cause.

Two months after Michael Brown’s death, they’re still fighting. Protests at the Ferguson Police Department’s headquarters happen regularly. Activists aren’t afraid to be arrested, blocking roads and disobeying commands to disperse to bring attention to their movement. The grand jury hearing evidence on Officer Wilson’s role in the shooting is due to make its decision soon, and rumors swirl that those seeking justice for Brown will not be happy with the result. What happens next will be shaped by Ferguson’s newest, youngest and fastest-growing political force.

]]>https://www.thenation.com/article/after-ferguson/What It Was Like Living Under Police Occupation in Fergusonhttps://www.thenation.com/article/what-it-was-living-under-police-occupation-ferguson/Steven Hsieh,Steven Hsieh,Raven Rakia,Steven HsiehAug 27, 2014Residents of Canfield Green Apartments have been faced with tremendous challenges in the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown—many a direct result of actions taken by the police.
]]>

Ferguson, Missouri—Three Mondays ago, Glenn Robinson was walking toward a protest at the end of his street when his eyes started to sting and his throat swelled up. Robinson, 63, immediately recognized the sensation. He first encountered tear gas more than four decades ago during basic Army training for the Vietnam War. But this time it was Robinson’s local police, not his fellow soldiers, that had fired the chemical weapons.

“It brought back bad memories,” Robinson said, sitting on a lawn chair on a sweltering Sunday afternoon. The retired veteran decided to skip the day’s protest and ran back to his daughter’s Canfield Green apartment, where he has lived for three years. They shut their screen door and blasted air conditioning to stop the tear gas from drifting into their home. But the damage may have already been done. Robinson is still dealing with a “peculiar feeling” in his throat and plans to see a doctor as soon as he gets the chance. “I’m going to the Army surplus store to buy myself a gas mask,” he said. “The police showed me that I should be prepared for anything.”

After two weeks of chaos and confusion, life for residents of Canfield Green, the predominately black apartment complex where officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, is slowly returning to normal. Not long ago, nightly protests on West Florissant Avenue—and the heavy-handed police response to them—disrupted neighborhood life, taking a major psychological and financial toll on residents. Tear gas and smoke launched by police drifted from the center of unrest, about a quarter-mile west, into people’s apartments. Blockades and checkpoints locked residents in, keeping them from going to work and school. Nearby convenience stores and markets, for some, the only feasible destination for groceries, closed after a small number of looters broke in late at night. On top of these challenges, residents were still grappling with the enduring image of a teenager gunned down in broad daylight right outside their homes and a growing feeling that the community’s police department does not exist to serve or protect them.

“In my book, we’re basically living under martial law,” said Adrian Wilkerson, standing across a makeshift memorial marking the spot of Michael Brown’s death. Brown often stayed at Wilkerson’s apartment to hang out and create rap music with his fiance’s brother. Although he appreciates the protests, Wilkerson has avoided West Florissant to be with Brown’s family and attend to his own life. “I don’t have time to get tear gassed or shot with rubber bullets. I have kids.”

Wilkerson, 27, found a job through a temp agency for an energy company further out in the suburbs. But at the height of the protests earlier this month, the bus he takes to work never came. Transportation officials had redrawn the only route that stops at Canfield Green to avoid the protests. Like other residents that spoke with The Nation, Wilkerson didn’t get the memo. He missed several days of work as a result, and says he’ll have trouble paying his bills this month. Wilkerson added, “Some people want to say, ‘These people don’t want to work.’ How can we work if we can’t even get on the bus?”

Earlier during the protests, when snipers still lay prone atop armored vehicles and K-9 dogs yowled at peaceful demonstrators, police completely blocked off the only entrance to Canfield Green, locking residents in their own neighborhood. Marquez Larkin, 19, recorded the blockade using his cell phone camera. Larkin and his girlfriend, Britanny Williams, work for a pharmaceutical company packing pills, but missed two days as a result of the blockade, which continued on and off for about five days. Eventually they found an alternate path out of the neighborhood—a lawn at the other end of the street, now indented with tread marks.

Once the unrest settled, police stopped blocking the entrance to Canfield Green. But an ID checkpoint further south on West Florissant was yet another hindrance to residents. Larkin, who moved to the neighborhood in June, still hasn’t had a chance to update the address on his driver’s license, so he was forced to drive several miles to avoid the checkpoint, burning extra fuel, in order to get back home. “I’m managing, but I’m behind on my rent now. We’re making just enough to get by,” Larkin said in his third-floor apartment.

“Officers were placed at these intersections to allow residents in and out access to help assure their safety,” a St. Louis County Police spokesperson said in an e-mail in response to questions about the impact the police presence had on residents of the apartment complex. “Whereas there may have been incidents where residents could not get home, no such reports were made to our communication center or our Internal Affairs Unit.”

The majority of Canfield Green residents who spoke with The Nation said they are not planning to move away from the neighborhood in the near future. But Elizabeth Moore, a 28-year-old home health aid, and Tramon Arthur, a 26-year-old hair stylist, couldn’t take it any more. The two, neighbors and friends, broke their leases and moved to a motel to keep their kids safe. “There’s been so much ruckus and chaos that just we packed up. They hit the boiling point for us,” Arthur said, sitting at a burger restaurant on West Florissant. “We’re scared for our lives. My kids are crying. Police are running up with guns by them,” Moore added.

Although she has been inconvenienced by the checkpoints, Wanda Edwards, 57, said she can tolerate the heavy police presence on West Florissant. “I understand they have to do their job. I understand they have to protect themselves, as well as the community. Though some of the things were over the top—all that riot gear and such,” she said on her second-floor deck. “At first, when it was really violent, it was really nerve-wracking. It has not been a good experience.” Edwards was supposed to start school at Columbia College last week, where she’ll be working towards a bachelor’s degree in human services, but she couldn’t figure out how to get out of her neighborhood.

The people of Canfield Green may have differing opinions about the recent police occupation of Ferguson, but everyone who spoke with The Nation agreed that Michael Brown met an unjust death at the hands of Darren Wilson and that something must change. Glenn Robinson, the Vietnam War vet, spoke of endemic racial profiling by area police. “They’ve been doing this shit for years and years and years. Since I was a kid,” he said. Wanda Edwards, who had never seen a dead body before Brown’s, said the police “need to come up with a better mindset on how they deal with people.” Tramon Arthur, who said he hurled a tear gas canister back at police after getting maced, wants “justice for the next generation of kids. This is history right now.”

Adrian Wilkerson, who often hosted Brown at his apartment, said he left South St. Louis because he thought Ferguson would be a better place to raise his two children, but now he feels like “there’s no hope for them—for how society sees them.”

“The guy the police officer killed was going to start college. He wasn’t into the negativity, and for them to take someone like that—how do you think that makes a person that has made a mistake or has been locked up before feel? ‘Oh, ya’ll just killed somebody that did nothing wrong, so I know you’re going to justify doing something to me?’” Wilkerson said. “The police feel like we’re taking this too seriously. You have to understand, they gunned him down like he was an animal. Then they left him in the street like he was road kill.”

Ferguson, Missouri—Images of police officers using tear gas and rubber bullets on protesters this month have shocked the world, raising awareness of America’s increasingly militarized police forces, many of which are subsidized by the federal government.

While most of the photos from the Ferguson protests were taken on West Florissant Avenue, cell-phone footage obtained by The Nation shows how the heavily armed police also made themselves known at Canfield Green Apartments, the neighborhood where Michael Brown was shot and killed on August 9. The video provides another example of the intimidation tactics so commonly used by law enforcement since the beginning of protests in Ferguson earlier this month.

The footage, captured by Canfield Green resident Marquez Larkin on the evening of August 13, features a line of about twenty police officers clad in riot gear, guarding the entrance of the neighborhood. Larkin said he and his brother, Khalil Fells, had just been herded back away from West Florissant at gunpoint.

They saw an unidentified man approaching the blockade of officers, walking back and forth at least three times. Larkin whipped out his cell phone and began to record. In the video, the man can be seen putting his hands up and yelling at the police before multiple popping sounds, which Larkin said came from police shooting rubber bullets, can be heard. The popping continues as the man turns around to walk away. Larkin and a crowd of spectators ran in the opposite direction of the police. Although it’s unclear from the video whether the man is shot, Fells said he saw him get hit in the foot.

Minutes later, a white woman approached the blockade, according to Fells. Although this moment was not captured on camera, another witness at the scene, Hakeem Ibery, also saw an “older white woman” approach the officers.

Fells observed, “Everybody clapped. They wanted to see what will happen to her. All [the police] said was, ‘Ma’am, can you please turn around?’”

Clayton, Missouri—Police arrested two protesters on Tuesday during a demonstration outside a government building, adding to a growing list of civil disobedience arrests related to the shooting death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by a police officer earlier this month.

Roughly sixty demonstrators gathered in front of the office building of St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch in Clayton, a wealthy city bordering St. Louis, about ten miles south of Ferguson. On a humid afternoon, the protesters chanted “Black lives matter!” and “Move Bob, get out the way!” A line of police officers guarded the building’s entrance, demarcating a no-walk zone directly in front of them.

Two protesters, Jamelle Spain and Alexis Templeton, peacefully approached the police officers. Officers then placed the two in plastic handcuffs and escorted them into the building. Spain and Templeton were both charged for failing to obey a police officer and will be released, according to a spokesperson for the Clayton Police Department.

Jeffrey Hill, 24, of the Organization for Black Struggle and Rasheed Aldridge, 20, of Show Me 15 protested in Clayton on Tuesday (Photo by Steven Hsieh)

The demonstrators demanded McCulloch step down from the Michael Brown investigation. They also called for the county to appoint an independent investigator to take over Brown’s case. Some residents of St. Louis County say McCulloch harbors a pro-police bias. McCulloch’s father, a police officer, was killed by a black man in 1964. McCulloch also harshly criticized Governor Nixon’s order last week to turn over the Ferguson protest jurisdiction to Missouri Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson, a move that was praised by community leaders and local politicians.

“We don’t feel like McCulloch can do this accurately. We feel like there’s a lot of emotions tied into everything he does when it comes with dealing with black people,” said Jeffrey Hill, a 24-year-old protester from North St. Louis County. Hill led chants through a megaphone and wore a surgical mask strapped to his head, noting the possibility of tear gas later Tuesday night.

A spokesperson for the county prosecutor’s office declined to comment on the protest. Reports say prosecutors will present evidence to a grand jury on Wednesday, who will decide whether to indict Darren Wilson, the white police officer who shot Brown.

The crowd began dispersing around 3:40 pm. As protesters headed across the street to a parking lot, they chanted, “We’ll be back! We’ll be back!”

St. Louis—In the second week of protests over the shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer, St. Louis Metropolitan police on Monday arrested nine protesters for blocking the entrance of a state office building.

Among those arrested was Hedy Epstein, a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor who lives in St. Louis.

“I’ve been doing this since I was a teenager. I didn’t think I would have to do it when I was 90,” Epstein told The Nation, as two officers walked her to a police van. “We need to stand up today so that people won’t have to do this when they’re 90.”

Roughly 125 protesters marched to the entrance of the historic Wainwright Building, which houses Missouri Governor Jay Nixon’s downtown office. They demanded Nixon withdraw National Guard troops from Ferguson municipality, where peaceful protests throughout the week were disrupted by late night riots. The protesters also called for a special prosecutor to lead the investigation of Brown’s death, as well as an expansion of the Department of Justice’s existing investigation to look into patterns of civil rights violations across North St. Louis County.

The crowd kicked off the two-block march singing, “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me ’round.” Participants took turns addressing the crowd, using a megaphone. The demonstrators chanted “Hey hey! Ho ho! National Guard has got to go!” and “Hands up! Don’t shoot!”

Ebony Williams, 22, addresses a crowd of protesters outside the Wainwright Building in downtown St. Louis. (Photo by Steven Hsieh)

Nine demonstrators linked arms in front of security guards at the building’s entrance, as police officers watched from inside. At around 4:20 pm, a police officer informed the nine that they each faced arrest for blocking the doorway. Shortly after, police escorted each demonstrator away in plastic handcuffs.

St. Louis police charged the nine arrestees with failure to disperse. All but one of were released, according to Jeff Ordower, an organizer with Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment.

The rally was organized by the Organization for Black Struggle. A Facebook page for the action reads, “Effective policing does not need to include masses of military equipment, intimidation, and denial of constitutional rights.”

Police also arrested Ebony Williams, a 22-year-old from St. Louis. Williams, who is pregnant, earlier told the crowd that she worries about raising her son around police officers that could target him because of his race.

“I’m out here standing up for what’s right. What they did to Michael Brown is not right,” Williams said. “We have to have justice. We want justice now.”

CORRECTION (8/19/2014 3:06 am): An earlier version of this post stated that eight protesters were arrested in downtown St. Louis on Monday. In fact, nine were arrested.

]]>https://www.thenation.com/article/st-louis-police-arrest-nine-protesters-demanding-justice-michael-brown/Despite SCOTUS Ban, 15 States Still Have Not Passed Laws Ending Mandatory Life Without Parole for Juvenileshttps://www.thenation.com/article/despite-scouts-ban-fifteen-states-still-allow-mandatory-life-without-parole-juveniles/Steven Hsieh,Steven Hsieh,Raven Rakia,Steven Hsieh,Steven Hsieh,Steven Hsieh,Steven Hsieh,Steven HsiehJun 25, 2014Two years after the Supreme Court ruled the practice unconstitutional, many states are still able to send children to die in prison without recourse.
]]>

Exactly two years after the US Supreme Court ruled against mandatory life without parole sentences for juveniles convicted of murder, the majority of states affected by the ruling have not passed laws banning the practice, according to a report by the Sentencing Project.

The Supreme Court ruled five-to-four in Miller v. Arizona that mandatory life without parole (LWOP) sentences for minors violate the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In her majority opinion, Justice Kagan cited research that found that “only a relatively small proportion of adolescents who experiment in risky or illegal activities develop entrenched patterns of problem behavior that persist into adulthood.”

Only thirteen of twenty-eight states that had locked up minors for life without a chance for release have passed laws to comply with the Court’s decision. Several of the states that amended their sentencing laws, however, set lengthy requirements that some juvenile advocates are still calling inhumane. For example, both Texas and Nebraska set new minimum sentences of forty years, practically guaranteeing that some juvenile offenders will spend the majority of their lives behind bars.

“It appears that many states are disregarding the spirit of the Court’s ruling. Of the states that have passed legislative responses to Miller, many replaced their laws with sentences that are as nearly as narrow-minded,” said Ashley Nellis, a senior analyst at the Sentencing Project, in a statement.

The Miller decision did not determine whether the estimated 2,000 prisoners already serving mandatory LWOP sentences would be eligible for re-sentencing. Ten of the twenty-eight affected states have addressed this issue, passing laws or issuing court decisions that apply Miller retroactively.

The Sentencing Project's report notes that states do not necessarily have to pass new legislation to comply with Miller, but

States’ practices of sending children to die in prison puts the United States at odds with international standards. In fact, ours is the only nation in the world that sends minors to die in prison, and is one of few that refuses to sign the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which bans the practice.

(CORRECTION, 6/26/2014): An earlier version of this post suggested that states must pass legislation to comply with Miller. In fact, some states have ended mandatory life without parole for juveniles through litigation. The headline and first paragraph of this post have been updated for clarification.

Seven-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones was shot to death by a SWAT officer during a midnight raid in Detroit, moments after a flashbang grenade lit her blanket on fire. The mayor of a small Maryland town and his spouse were held at gunpoint for hours on unfounded drug allegations, during which time officers shot and killed their two dogs. A SWAT officer’s flashbang landed in a baby’s crib, blowing a hole in the 19-month-old’s face and chest.

In a new report, the American Civil Liberties Union ties each of these tragic stories to the increasing militarization of America’s police forces, a trend financially and materially supported by the federal government. The report, titled “War Comes Home,” finds that SWAT teams, equipped with assault rifles and armored vehicles, are mostly used to search suspected drug offenders’ homes, rather than rescuing hostages or stopping active shooters.

“Our police are trampling on our civil rights and turning communities of color into war zones,” ACLU Senior Counsel Kara Dansky said in a statement. “We all pay for it with our tax dollars.”

ACLU Researchers examined 818 SWAT incident reports, filed between 2011 and 2012, from twenty police departments in eleven states. The data, obtained through public records requests, was collected by local ACLU affiliates over the span of a year.

The data lends credence to long-held assumptions that SWAT teams primarily serve to fight the War on Drugs. Of the deployments examined by the ACLU, 62 percent were for drug searches, while nearly 80 percent involved search warrants. In contrast, only 7 percent of deployments responded to hostage, barricade or active shooters, the types of emergency situations for which SWAT teams were originally created. At least 36 percent of drug search deployments, and as many as 65 percent, turned up no evidence of contraband.

(ACLU)

As with other components of the War on Drugs, the SWAT raids examined by the ACLU disproportionately targeted people of color. Of people impacted by the ACLU’s sample of paramilitary deployments, 37 percent are black, 12 percent are Latino and 19 percent are white. Another 32 percent are of unknown race, because some police departments failed to record that information.

(ACLU)

The scope of police militarization in America would not be possible without the help of the federal government. Programs run by the Defense Department and Department of Homeland Security provide millions of dollars’ worth of military equipment to police departments every year, while grant money from the Justice Department is often used to buy weapons and body armor. For example, the North Little Rock Police Department in Arkansas received thirty-four semi-automatic rifles from the DOD, along with two MARCbots (military robots used in Afghanistan), ground troop helmets and a Mamba tactical vehicle.

The ACLU’s report builds on the research of Peter Kraska, an Eastern Kentucky University professor who found a 1,400 percent increase in the total number of SWAT deployments between 1989 and 2000. Kraska concluded that SWAT teams have evolved from “strictly reactive components” of police departments to proactive units “actively engaged in fighting the drug war.”

“The ACLU’s data demonstrates what we’ve known for a long time, though it certainly provides updated information,” Kraska told The Nation. “Police departments are not sitting back and responding to serious situations underway. They’re actually going out and manufacturing very risky and dangerous situations by choosing to use the military special operations model approach to police the drug problem inside people’s private residences.”

Kara Dansky, senior counsel at the ACLU and the report’s lead writer, said it is currently impossible to conduct a comprehensive analysis of police militarization nationwide, because there is very little public oversight of SWAT teams. Researchers found that data collection among police departments was “at best sporadic and at worst virtually nonexistent” in the context of SWAT.

“If we could get police departments to mandate reporting, this necessary information would be more readily available and someone could conduct a more thorough study,” Dansky told The Nation. “The people have a right to know when police are raiding homes for nonviolent drug allegations, using excessively aggressive and militarized tactics.”

The Obama administration on Friday announced a plan to open new detention facilities to house families apprehended while crossing the southwest border, drawing criticism from congressional Democrats and immigrant rights groups who say there are more humane ways to handle migrants.

“Human rights require that detention be the last resort, not the first,” said ACLU Legislative Counsel Joanne Lin in a statement. “Families should be moved out of detention as soon as possible and be released under humane and reasonable supervision, including community-based alternatives to detention which have proven to be cost-effective and efficient.”

The push for ramped-up detention is the federal government’s response to an unprecedented surge of migrant children crossing the US-Mexico border, which both Democrats and Republicans are calling a humanitarian crisis. The plan also calls for more judges and immigration officials in the area to expedite deportation proceedings. While the majority of children detained near the border are traveling alone, the new detention centers will specifically house children who came with families.

Clara Long, an immigration policy researcher at Human Rights Watch told The Nation, “We’re really concerned that, especially where children are detained, that these centers will not be under compliance with international law.”

“The underlying approach to such a program should be ‘care’ and not ‘detention,’” Long said, stressing that children under detention are entitled to education, legal aid, counseling and recreation. Alternatives to detention, such as electronic monitoring via ankle bracelets, should be considered, Long added.

US Border Patrol says it has captured 47,000 unaccompanied minors since October 1 and estimates say that number could reach 90,000 by the end of this fiscal year. Most of the minors arrived from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, countries plagued by rampant gang violence. Researchers for the UN human rights commissioner for refugees found that many of the children crossing the border are fleeing threats of violence in their home countries. Fifty-eight percent of 400 unaccompanied minors interviewed by researchers “raise potential international protection needs.” UNHCR guidelines minors who are seeking asylum “should not, as a general rule, be detained.”

“As a human rights organization, it bothers us that they see detention as the only option. It doesn’t matter how many more beds they have, this will continue to happen,” said Fernando Garcia, executive director of the Texas-based Border Network For Human Rights. “We need policy solutions, not just infrastructure.”

Garcia told The Nation that the federal government should find a way to grant asylum to migrants fleeing violence in their home countries. There should also be legal path for migrants to reunite with families are already living in the US, he added.

Congressional Democrats, including Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and Representative Luiz Guiterrez (D-IL), also spoke out against the detention plan. In a statement offered to BuzzFeed, Senator Menendez said, “Using up our nation’s resources to jail families will not be a deterrent—these kids are fleeing violence and are willing to risk their lives to cross the border. The threat of a jail will not stop these families from coming here. Instead, we need to fully address the root causes of the crisis.”

On Thursday, Senator Menendez released a twenty-point plan to address the border crisis. The plan recommends Obama administration to continue cracking down on human smugglers and traffickers taking advantage of the surge. It also calls for increased efforts to provide detainee children with legal representation.

Under mounting pressure from lawmakers and immigrant rights groups, Border Patrol officials on Wednesday finally let reporters visit two processing facilities where hundreds of unaccompanied migrant youth are being detained.

Some 900 children are being housed at a former warehouse in Nogales, Arizona, which was recently outfitted to handle an unprecedented surge of mostly Central American child migrants across the US-Mexico border. Another facility in Brownsville, Texas, is holding around 500 children, double its intended capacity. The Los Angeles Timesdescribed conditions there as “overcrowded and unsanitary.” CBP is required by law to turn over any migrant children to the Department of Health and Human Services within seventy-two hours of detaining them. Officials at the Nogales and Brownsville facilities told reporters they are struggling to meet this requirement.

Earlier this month, the White House requested $2 billion to handle the surge of migrant youths, which President Obama has declared an “urgent humanitarian situation.” US Customs and Border Protection reports that around 47,000 unaccompanied children have crossed the border since October 1, 2013, nearly double the amount of last year. A majority of the migrant children arrived from Central American countries, seeking refuge from rampant violence or hoping to reconnect with family members already in the states.

CBP officials took reporters on highly controlled tours of the Brownsville and Nogales facilities, in which visitors were prohibited from bringing cellphones and sound recorders, or speaking with any of the children. Only two photographers, one for each facility, were allowed to bring a camera. Here are some of their photos:

Some 900 unaccompanied children are being held at a converted warehouse in Nogales. Border Patrol officials set up the Arizona facility after a similiar processing center in Texas ran out of space. (Reuters/Ross D. Franklin/Pool)

Female detainees sleep in a holding cell. According to The New York Times, children held at the Nogales facility are allowed just forty-five minutes of outdoor time a day. (Reuters/Ross D. Franklin/Pool)

Child detainees wait to use a portable restroom, as a World Cup match plays on a suspended television. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin, Pool)

]]>https://www.thenation.com/article/what-overcrowded-holding-center-migrant-children-looks/Will the Death Penalty Return to the US This Week?https://www.thenation.com/article/will-death-penalty-return-us-week/Steven Hsieh,Steven Hsieh,Raven Rakia,Steven Hsieh,Steven Hsieh,Steven Hsieh,Steven Hsieh,Steven Hsieh,Steven Hsieh,Steven Hsieh,Steven Hsieh,Steven HsiehJun 17, 2014If a Georgia execution goes as planned, it will be the first to take place in the United States since Oklahoma officials botched the lethal injection of Clayton Lockett on April 29.
]]>

Three prisoners could be executed in the coming days, ending a nearly two-month, de facto moratorium on American capital punishment since a gruesomely botched attempt in Oklahoma renewed national debates over death penalty procedures.

Georgia inmate Marcus Wellons is set to die today at 7 pm ET. The Florida execution of John Ruthell Henry is scheduled for 6 pm Wednesday. A stayed execution in Missouri, originally scheduled for midnight tonight, could still proceed if state prosecutors succeed in appealing a federal judge’s decision.

If Wellons’s execution goes as planned, it will be the first to take place in the United States since Oklahoma officials botched the execution of Lockett on April 29. Lockett “writhed and grimaced,” apparently in pain, during a forty-three-minute procedure, even after he was already declared unconscious.

Lockett’s gruesome death prompted calls for increased transparency over death penalty procedures. President Obama last month asked the Justice Department to investigate the implementation of capital punishment throughout the country, calling the situation in Oklahoma “deeply troubling.” Judges have stayed or delayed eight executions since April’s botched lethal injection.

“Oklahoma turned the corner. People are more skeptical of how reliable the whole process is. That puts a high burden on Georgia and Florida to be prepared,” said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “Now, with executions, everybody is watching to see if anything goes wrong.”

As with Oklahoma, the three states set to execute prisoners this week won’t disclose where they procured their lethal injection drugs. Georgia’s Supreme Court most recently upheld a law protecting the anonymity of the state’s drug source, arguing that secrecy makes the execution process “more timely and orderly.”

Wellons’s attorneys cited Oklahoma’s botched execution in arguing that Georgia’s secrecy statute “deprives him and this court of the information necessary to determine whether those procedures present a ‘substantial risk of significant harm’ in violation of his Eighth Amendment rights.” Wellons was sentenced to death for the 1989 rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl.

A federal judge last week temporarily halted the execution of John Winfield, originally scheduled to die in Missouri at 12:01 am Wednesday, but state prosecutors are appealing that decision. Winfield’s lawyers presented evidence that state prison officials had unlawfully interfered in his clemency process. Winfield was convicted of shooting three women in the head, killing two, during a 1996 rampage against an ex-girlfriend.

Florida’s Supreme Court last week rejected an appeal from John Henry, whose attorneys argued that he is not mentally fit for execution. Henry stabbed his estranged wife and 5-year-old son to death in 1989. He has an IQ of 78, according to a test, but attorneys said his “abhorrent childhood, extensive personal and family mental health history, poor social adjustment, and lack of rational thinking and reasoning skills so impaired his adaptive functioning that he was actually performing at the level of a person with an IQ of 70,” the state’s cutoff for executions.

Oklahoma officials failed to properly insert an IV into death row prisoner Clayton Lockett, despite his having healthy veins, according to a preliminary autopsy report released by attorneys Friday.

Lockett, a convicted murderer and rapist, died during a botched lethal injection that the White House said fell short of “humane” standards. Media witnesses saw Lockett writhe and kick, apparently in pain, after he was already declared unconscious. He died forty-three minutes after the procedure began.

An independent autopsy, performed by Dr. Joseph Cohen, revealed that Lockett’s veins were in excellent condition for the injection procedure. Despite that, punctures on Lockett’s arms and groin area indicate that medical professionals failed in multiple attempts to set an IV in his veins. Attorneys say Dr. Cohen’s findings contradict official claims that Lockett’s vein collapsed during the procedure.

Little is known about the medical professionals who botched Lockett’s procedure, since Oklahoma law shields the identities of execution team personnel. An initial report from Oklahoma’s Department of Corrections said a phlebotomist placed the IV into Lockett, in violation of the state’s execution protocol. When asked by Tulsa World in May, DOC officials reversed this claim, saying that the person was actually an EMT.

Dr. Cohen is requesting additional information to complete the autopsy, including a medical examination of his heart and larynx, which were removed by officials after the execution. He is also asking for Oklahoma’s execution policies and procedures and Lockett’s complete medical and prison records.

“Dr. Cohen has begun a critically important inquiry into the botched execution of Clayton Lockett,” says Dr. Mark Heath, assistant professor of anesthesiology at Columbia University and expert in lethal injection executions, in a statement. “However, to complete this inquiry, Dr. Cohen will need the state to provide extensive additional information beyond what the body itself revealed. I hope that Oklahoma provides everything he asks for so that we can all understand what went so terribly wrong in Mr. Lockett’s execution.”

Five immigrant rights groups filed a complaint Wednesday accusing US border officials of participating in the systemic abuse of unaccompanied migrant children detained near the southwest border, including physical and sexual abuse, painful shackling and denial of adequate food and water.

The complaint details alleged abuse and mistreatment suffered by 116 children detained by US Customs and Border Protection officials. One in four children said they experienced physical abuse, including kicking, beating and forced stress positions. More than half reported verbal abuse, including taunts, death threats and racist or sexually charged comments. A majority said they were held for longer than seventy-two hours, the maximum time permitted before CBP officials are required to transfer custody to the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

Cases of abuse and mistreatment are described in graphic detail. A sixteen-year-old Central American girl said agents “violently spread her legs” while searching her, touching her genitalia and making her scream. A seventeen-year-old boy detained near Hidalgo, Texas said he was forced to maintain a stress position for twenty minutes as punishment for laughing. A seventeen-year-old rape survivor who fled Guatemala said she was repeatedly harassed by CBP officials; one allegedly told her, “We’re going to put you on a plane, and I hope it explodes. That would be the happiest day of my life.”

Most of the children reported being held in frigid holding cells, nicknamed hieleras, Spanish for “freezers.” Interviewees described squalid conditions at these sites, including severe overcrowding and scarce food and water. In at least one facility, up to 100 children share a single toilet, exposed in plain view to everyone, including CBP officers.

The complaint was filed with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, as well as the Office of the Inspector General. Its authors include the National Immigrant Justice Center, Esperanza Immigrant Rights Project, the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona and Americans for Immigrant Justice.

In response to the complaint, CBP spokesperson Michael Friel said, “While in temporary custody, CBP strives to protect unaccompanied children with special procedures and safeguards…. Mistreatment or misconduct is not tolerated.”

The accusations come as immigration officials struggle to deal with unprecedented influx of migrant children across the US-Mexico border, deemed an “urgent humanitarian crisis” by President Obama. CBP officials have apprehended more than 47,000 unaccompanied children since October, nearly double the number from last year. Experts tie the surge of child migrants to increasing gang violence in Central America, including Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Human and civil rights advocates say the recent influx of migrant youths highlights the need to address CBP’s systemic abuse.

“Children are fleeing untenable conditions in their home countries, including pervasive violence and persecution, and are often re-victimized in transit to the United States,” said Joseph Anderson, director of litigation for Americans for Immigrant Justice, in a statement. “We need to ensure that these children are treated with dignity and respect and afforded all applicable legal protections while they are in US custody.”

CBP, the largest law enforcement agency in the nation, is no stranger to accusations of misconduct. The agency removed its top internal affairs chief this week over mounting criticism that he routinely refused to investigate use-of-force allegations.

The groups involved with the complaint are calling for immediate redress and reform, including enhanced oversight through an independent body and the creation of short-term detention standards, as well as a streamlined complaint process. They are also asking for an investigation into the abuse cases described in the complaint.

“This complaint is further proof that the CBP is an agency in need of massive reform,” said James Lyall of the ACLU Border Litigation Project. “This should be the final straw.”

Immigrant advocates and public officials are raising concerns about the conditions at a makeshift Border Patrol facility in Arizona that is temporarily housing hundreds of unaccompanied children, part of an unprecedented surge of cross-border migration that President Obama has called an “urgent humanitarian situation.”

Officials say conditions at facility in Nogales, a warehouse, have improved since last week, when reports emerged that some children were sleeping on plastic containers, while others had gone ten days without showering. US Customs and Border Protection officials have secured mattresses and shower facilities for the children. Still, the warehouse does not have indoor plumbing and officials have raised questions about the food being served to the children.

Most of the thousand or so migrant children currently housed in the warehouse were apprehended in Texas and subsequently flown to Arizona due to space constraints. Officials said the children will eventually be transferred to military bases in Texas, California and Oklahoma.

In a letter to President Obama, Representative Raúl M. Grijalva (D-AZ) said the Nogales facility is not in a suitable condition to hold the unaccompanied children. Representative Grijalva requested details on improvements to the facility as well as a contingency location “in the event that the improvements necessary to make conditions habitable are not immediately possible.” He also asked the White House to allow humanitarian groups on the south side of the border to enter Arizona to help treat the unaccompanied children.

Federal law requires ICE officials to turn over unaccompanied children to the Office of Refugee Resettlement within seventy-two hours. The ORR is then tasked with finding adult relatives or foster families to look after the children as they await deportation proceedings.

Immigration advocates have long predicted an influx of unaccompanied migrant children this month, owing to seasonal migration patterns and rising violence in Central America. Most of the children waiting in Nogales migrated from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, countries where gang violence is particularly prevalent.

A report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees found that many unaccompanied children apprehended at the US-Mexico border “may well be in need of international protection.” UNCHR researchers interviewed 402 children, finding that 58 percent left their home country after suffering, or being threatened with, gang violence, sexual abuse or exploitation by the smuggling industry.

US Customs and Border Protection reports that 47,017 unaccompanied children have been apprehended at the border this fiscal year, since October 1, nearly double the total number from FY2013. The number of unaccompanied children crossing the border from El Salvador, Guatemala or Honduras has increased by more than 1,000 percent since 2009.

White House officials told reporters that they expected an influx of migrant children, but were caught off guard by the magnitude of the surge. The Los Angeles Times reported Monday that the Obama administration is asking for about $2 billion dollars to handle the crisis.

Orange is the New Black, the Netflix series returning Friday, explores the lives of women serving time at Litchfield Penitentiary, a fictional prison in upstate New York.

The series was partially filmed at Suffolk County jail in Riverhead, a men’s facility in Long Island. But when viewers stream Orange over the weekend, they likely won’t see—and certainly won’t smell—the overflow of feces Riverhead’s actual prisoners are exposed to every day.

To mark the season two premiere of Orange, prisoners’ rights advocates launched a campaign to raise awareness of the notoriously squalid conditions at Riverhead and Yaphank, another Suffolk County jail. Twitter users tweeted from the hashtag #HumanityIsTheNewBlack to spread the word. A call to action posted online by the New York Civil Liberties Union reads, “Suffolk County should take the energy it puts into wooing Hollywood into cleaning up the shocking conditions at the Riverhead and Yaphank jails.” NYCLU Senior Legal Adviser Corey Stoughton said the campaigners hope to connect viewers’ empathy for characters in the show with prisoners in real life.

“What I love about the show is how good it is at portraying the humanity of people who are flawed and have made mistakes, but are still human beings who deserve respect,” Stoughton told The Nation. “That’s true of the people housed at the real jail as it is of the characters in the show.”

The NYCLU and law firm Shearman & Sterling filed a class-action lawsuit in 2012 on behalf of current and former prisoners at Riverhead and Yaphank. The suit claims that prisoners housed at the jails live “amidst filth, overflowing sewage, and pervasive mold, rust, and vermin.” Tap water is regularly “brown or yellow in color,” and many inmates forgo drinking it to avoid getting sick.

The lawsuit describes a plumbing issue that causes sewage in one toilet to rise in another, sometimes overflowing onto cell floors, described as a health hazard by facility nurses. The accumulation of waste from so-called “ping-pong toilets” causes inmates “to regularly vomit, cough, and suffer from nausea and severe headaches due to the fumes,” the lawsuit states. In this video, former Riverhead detainee Jason Porter recounts an incident in which every toilet on a tier “exploded,” producing a flood of human waste reaching “about seven inches above the ground”

The chief of staff for the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office, Michael Sharkey, told The Nation that the Orange crew filmed portions of one episode at Riverhead jail in “an area of the facility not populated at the time.” Sharkey declined to comment on the specifics of the lawsuit.

Unlike the women in Orange, most of the men detained at Riverhead are awaiting trial and have not been convicted of a crime, while others are serving short sentences for minor violations.

An ex-deputy described in federal court Tuesday how he and his colleagues routinely abused inmates at LA County jails and falsified reports to justify their actions, the latest sign of a culture of brutality pervading the county’s jail system.

Former Sheriff’s Deputy Gilbert Michel, 40, described how guards would beat, slap and tase inmates unprovoked, knowing that they would receive total impunity for their actions, reports the Los Angeles Times. If inmates sustained injuries from abuse, deputies would simply make up scenarios to shift the blame onto their victims. Deputies didn’t bother writing reports if inmates didn’t display evidence of physical abuse. Michel added that he learned the abusive practice “on the job.”

Michel testified in the trial of six sheriff’s officials accused of obstructing a federal civil rights investigation of excessive force allegations. He described one incident in which an inmate refused to answer his questions, telling the deputy to “talk to my lawyer.” As the inmate headed back to his cell, another deputy told Michel that the inmate was laughing at him. Michel responded with violence:

Michel said he called the inmate back out into the hallway and told him to face the wall. He told the inmate to spread his legs—and when he didn’t, Michel said, he kicked the inmate’s leg to make him buckle, grabbed the back of his neck and shoved his face into the wall. He did it to provoke a fight and justify a beating, the former deputy said.

LA County jails have a history of pervasive deputy-on-inmate violence. A 2011 report by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California details the systematic use of excessive force by LA County sheriff’s officers, including dozens of accusations of abuse from inmates and former inmates. Peter Eliasberg, Legal Director of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, said the abuse described in Michel’s testimony is not at all surprising.

“Nothing he says is inconsistent with what we’ve been saying for a long time,” Eliasberg told The Nation. “There has been a long pattern of abuse in the jails by deputies to inmates. It is a culture thing. It’s not just a few isolated incidents, but it is in fact commonplace.”

Another report, commissioned by LA County, also found “a pattern of unreasonable force” in the jails, blaming it on a “failure of leadership” among the department’s top officials. The report was especially critical of former Sheriff Lee Baca, who retired earlier this year amid federal investigations of his department.

This week marks twenty-five years since the People’s Liberation Army slaughtered hundreds, possibly thousands, of unarmed civilians while cracking down on the student-led protest movement in Beijing.

The Chinese government has marked the occasion, as it does every year, with a campaign of increased censorship. Authorities have detained, arrested or questioned dozens of dissidents in recent months, as Internet scrubbers work around the clock to expunge any reference to June 4, 1989, from the record. Few young Chinese know what happened that spring, and most who do dare not speak of it openly.

On the other hand, Western media far too often tells a distorted, simplified version of the story. Robin Munro, a researcher for Human Rights Watch in 1989, was one of few foreigners to witness the final moments in Tiananmen Square that fateful night. Writing for The Nation one year later, Munro sought to correct the popular misconception that students bore the brunt of state-sponsored violence, and that the massacre took place in the square itself. Not so, observed Munro, who watched firsthand the 3,000 or so remaining protesters safely exiting Tiananmen Square at dawn. In reality, “the great majority of those who died were workers, or laobaixing (“common folk”) and they died mainly on the approach roads in western Beijing.”

Munro’s clarification, “Who Died in Beijing, and Why,” shed essential light on the Communist Party’s true fear in 1989: a “full-fledged insurrection” by working-class citizens, who had come out in droves to support the young protesters in the weeks leading up to bloodshed.

“Nothing serves the cause of China’s students and laobaixing better than the unvarnished truth, for it speaks eloquently of their heroism and of the regime’s cowardice and brutality,” Munro wrote. “Western criticisms based on a false version of the clearing of Tiananmen Square have handed the butchers of Beijing needless propaganda victories in the UN and elsewhere.”

Days before the military crackdown, Nation editors hinted at the threat posed by the gathering commoners, as the Communist Party saw it. At that point, hundreds of thousands had filled Tiananmen, inspired by hunger striking students. Our editors wrote, “[W]here a march of 10,000 was an extraordinary event, half a million is suddenly commonplace. What makes this possible is nothing less than a manifest crisis of the legitimacy of the state.” They pushed back against the framing of the protests as “the triumph of the West” and refocused on the discontented masses:

The sirens of the West advised China to flood its markets with goodies and the people would be happy. But that was a fallacy, and the students have the evidence—the corruption of the party, which is what has resulted from China’s unholy marriage between market reform and an unregenerated, closed political system.

In more recent years, Nation contributors have placed anniversaries of the massacre in contemporary contexts. At ten years, journalist Sophie Beach reported on another set of protests taking place in Beijing, this time approved by the Communist Party. In spring of 1999, most demonstrators were not targeting their government, but NATO and the American military, which had recently bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade amid the Kosovo war. Beach, now editor of China Digital Times, observed at the time that The Party used the NATO protests to silence the few dissidents who wanted to talk about Tiananmen:

Indeed, since the NATO bombing, the government has intensified its pre-June 4 crackdown, denouncing concepts of democracy and human rights as synonymous with US hegemony. The People’s Daily, the Communist Party mouthpiece, ran an article in late May condemning overseas democracy activists as traitors to their country.

For the twentieth anniversary of the massacre, China historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom reflected on the necessity of “dwelling” on Tiananmen. We remember 1989 “because common misconceptions about that year persist,” as highlighted by Munro, but also “to stay humble.” Wasserstrom writes that every China specialist was surprised by what happend that spring, “if not by the fact that a massacre occurred then by how long it took for the tanks to roll; if not by how many people risked their lives to fight for change then by the role rock music played in the protests.”

Though writing ten years apart, Beach and Wasserstrom both explored the possibility of a future uprising, as ordinary Chinese, left behind by the “economic miracle,” become increasingly frustrated with the corruption and opulence displayed by the nation’s ruling elite. Amid the global recession, Wasserstrom wrote:

The party’s real difficulties will come when the memory of the recent upward surge has receded and a broad cross-section of people who have been left behind start to lose hope of prosperous times ahead. This is bound to happen eventually, but not yet. And we should not underestimate the ability of this regime, which has been so effective at defying the odds, to further delay its long-predicted demise.

Five years later, and income inequality in China has reached new heights, while reports of corruption among party officials seem to pop up by the day. Mass industrialization has rendered the air in major cities practically unbreathable. A quarter-century after the June 4 massacre, China has yet to resolve the tensions that inspired the students and workers of Tiananmen Square.

Under pressure from media organizations, federal lawmakers and human rights groups, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) on Friday released a highly critical review of its own use-of-force policies, which the agency had kept under wraps for more than a year.

The review, commissioned by agency officials to the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), examined sixty-seven cases involving the use deadly force by US Border Patrol agents. The report’s authors identified a number of questionable practices, finding that some agents had intentionally stepped in front of moving vehicles to justify shooting at them. Other agents appeared to have fired their weapons at rock-throwers, when simply moving away from the projectiles was an option.

CBP, US Border Patrol’s parent agency, also revealed revised use-of-force guidelines to comply with PERF’s major recommendations. According to Commissioner R. Gil Kerlikowske, the release of both documents is part of a push to increase transparency at the agency, considered one of the most secretive in the federal government.

Human rights groups and members of Congress have repeatedly criticized CBP for concealing its policies, as well as failing to hold agents accountable for questionable uses of force. Border agents have killed at least twenty-eight people since 2010, nine of whom were throwing rocks when confronted by agents with deadly force. No agents are known to have been punished for actions related to the recent spate of killings.

“Before my confirmation, I told Congress that transparency, responsiveness and communication are my hallmarks. I am committed to an open dialogue between CBP and its stakeholders,” said Kerlikowske, who was sworn in this past March. “Today’s actions on CBP’s policies address my priorities for the agency and are a significant step in CBP’s continuing progress.”

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit last week under the Freedom of Information Act to compel CBP to release the report. ACLU policy analyst Ruthie Epstein welcomed the revised guidelines, but said that more needs to be done.

“Equipping Border Patrol agents with body-worn cameras will ensure an unbiased record and allow the agency and the community to ensure that these new and improved policies are fully implemented in practice, as well as on paper,” Epstein said in a statement.

US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is refusing to release an independent review of its own use-of-force practices, denying repeated requests from members of Congress, media organizations and civil rights groups.

The review in question was commissioned to the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit that develops best practices for law enforcement agencies. PERF researchers examined sixty-seven use-of-force cases that resulted in nineteen deaths, according to the Los Angeles Times, which obtained a leaked version of the “scathing” report earlier this year.

An in-depth investigation by the Arizona Republic found that at least forty-five people have been killed by CBP agents since 2005, including three teenagers who were shot in the back. The Republic’s investigation also revealed that no agents are known to have been disciplined for any of those incidents.

The Center for Investigative Reporting revealed last Friday that CBP denied its open records request for the PERF report eight months after it was initially filed. In denying the request, CBP personnel cited a Freedom of Information Act exemption intended to protect the “free and frank exchange of information among agency personnel.”

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit Thursday seeking to force CBP to release the PERF report, arguing that its disclosure “is critical to a full and fair public debate about CBP’s use-of-force policies and practices.”

According to another document leaked to the Los Angeles Times, CBP officials initially rejected two major recommendations from the PERF report: (1) barring agents from shooting at vehicles unless the agents’ lives are at risk and (2) barring agents from shooting at people throwing objects, unless the projectiles are life-threatening. But just two weeks after the LA Times revealed PERF's recommendations and CBP's subsequent rejection, Border Patrol Chief Mark J. Fisher ordered agents to stop both practices.

“[R]elease of the PERF Report is necessary to assess why CBP rejected recommendations by the very respected and independent law enforcement think tank whose expertise CBP sought,” the ACLU’s lawsuit states.

Customs and Border Protection ordered the PERF review after a 2012 letter from sixteen members of Congress responding to the death of Anastasio Hernandez Rojas, a migrant who was beaten and tased by border agents in 2010. The circumstances surrounding Rojas’s death were caught on a cell phone video and aired as part of a joint investigation by PBS and The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute. CBP also commissioned reviews from an internal investigator and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General.

Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam signed a bill Thursday permitting prison officials to use the electric chair to execute death row inmates in the event that lethal injection drugs are unavailable.

The bill makes Tennessee the only state authorizing electrocution as a potential default method of execution. Eight other states allow the use of the electric chair, but only if inmates choose it over another method, usually lethal injection.

We spoke with Dr. Austin Sarat, professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst University, about what this means for Tennessee and capital punishment in the United States. Sarat is the author of Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty.

Steven Hsieh: What happens when an electrocution goes awry?

Austin Sarat: The problems with the electric chair run from merely technical problems to problems with gruesome results. One problem with the electric chair is, on occasion, the voltage of the electricity isn’t sufficient to kill the condemned. A classic example happened in Louisiana in the 1940s when a condemned man named Willie Francis was to be put to death by electrocution. The voltage of electricity administered was not enough to kill him, and after passage of some time, he was removed from the chair, brought back to the jail and a second effort to execute him was scheduled. He contested that second execution attempt, but the US Supreme Court allowed it to go forward. On the other end of the continuum, the electric chair has resulted in people catching on fire. That became a particular problem in Florida in the 1970s and early 1980s. Indeed the first electrocution in the United States, carried out in New York, the execution of someone named William Kemmler, was also botched in a rather gruesome way.

What is the more humane execution method: electrocution or lethal injection?

That is the wrong question. It assumes that it is possible to ensure that an execution will not be botched. I’ve studied every execution between 1890 and 2010 to determine how reliable, safe and humane the methods have been. If you look at every execution over that period of time, approximately 3 percent of executions were botched. If you look at just lethal injection, slightly more than 7 percent in the United States has been botched. In every turn, as we’ve thought about the methods by which we put people to death, the same promises have been made. Go back to the nineteenth century and you look at what proponents of the electric chair said. They said it’d be safe, reliable and humane. If you move forward in the early twentieth century when the gas chamber was authorized and first used in Nevada, proponents of the gas chamber said it would be safe, reliable and humane. If you fast forward to the late 1970s, when Oklahoma became the first state to authorize death by lethal injection, the proponents of lethal injection said it would be safe, reliable and humane. So, I don’t think we’ve found, or are likely to find, a method of execution in which the technology will ensure us that things won’t go wrong. We know that failures will happen. We don’t know when. We can’t predict them, necessarily. What has happened is botched executions are regarded as mere accidents. But if we look at a broader picture of these “mere accidents,” we see that they happen with unnerving frequency.

Tennessee’s effort to bring back the electric chair seems like an act of desperation. What’s going on here?

What’s happening in Tennessee has to be seen in the broad context of what’s happening with the death penalty in the United States. We’re in a period of national reconsideration of capital punishment in this country. We’re in a period where proponents of capital punishment are on the defensive. If you go back to the late ’90s, about 300 people a year were being sentenced to death. That number has been cut by almost two-thirds. Increasingly, Americans look at the death penalty not as an abstract moral question but as a question about whether the death penalty system actually works. We’re increasing our doubts about the capacity to differentiate the guilty from the innocent, our capacity to determine who among the guilty actually deserves the death penalty, and now our capacity to execute those who we determine to die in a way that is compatible with the Eighth Amendment’s commitment that punishment should not be cruel.

What Tennessee is doing is a further symptom of a death penalty system in disarray. After all, the legitimacy of the death penalty in the United States has, over the course of the last century, depended on the promise of scientific progress, such that we could find a method of execution that would be safe, reliable and humane. Going backwards, it seems to me, will further unravel and discredit the system of capital punishment in the United States. Were Tennessee carry out an electrocution, they would be running the risk that execution would be botched in ways that are even more gruesome than what happened in Oklahoma.

This bill would allow the corrections department to force electrocution on the condemned. Do you think this would fly legally?

More than twenty years ago, in the face of a series of botched executions in Florida, a constitutional challenge was brought to the US Supreme Court alleging that electrocution should be declared unconstitutional. So concerned were public officials in Florida that the Supreme Court would strike down the electric chair, that the state enacted a bill to change its primary method of execution to lethal injection. I think that if the state of Tennessee went forward with a series of electrocutions, there would be a series of legal challenges, which would have a very substantial prospect of prevailing. Nebraska’s Supreme Court, some years ago, declared electrocution to be unconstitutional. If electrocution were to be used, it would actually damage the prospect of survival in the United States.

Will America ever abolish the death penalty?

We’re already on the road to abolition. This period of national reconsideration has refocused the attention of Americans on the death penalty. It’s changed the question. The question used to be focused on the condemned, those we punish. Today, the question is, “Can we impose death penalty in a way that doesn’t damage central American values?” After all, you can be favor of the death penalty in the abstract, but be reluctant to execute the innocent. You can be in favor of the death penalty in the abstract, but be reluctant to impose it because of the race of the offender or race of the victim. You can be in favor of the death penalty in the abstract, but appalled at how costly it is to carry it out. You can be in favor of the death penalty in the abstract, and be repulsed by the idea that when we put someone to death, we can’t do it in a way that is humane. I think abolition will happen in the United States. It will happen slowly, and not without some reversals—a kind of two-steps-forward-and-one-step-back process.

In a historic settlement, Ohio’s juvenile corrections agency agreed to “dramatically reduce, and eventually eliminate” the use of disciplinary solitary confinement in youth prisons.

The agreement—between the US Department of Justice and Ohio’s Department of Youth Services (DYS)—represents the first federal-level move to end disciplinary seclusion at juvenile facilities. The court order compels Ohio corrections officials to provide medical treatment to juveniles with mental health needs, rather than isolating them.

Wednesday’s settlement comes off the heels of an announcement last week by Attorney General Eric Holder calling for an end to the “excessive” use of seclusion on juvenile inmates, especially on children with mental health needs.

“This agreement will help ensure that incarceration in Ohio’s state facilities is humane and that appropriate treatment is provided for young people with mental illness,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement. “The Justice Department will continue to evaluate the use of solitary confinement so that it does not become a new normal for incarcerated juveniles.”

Human rights groups have long contended that solitary confinement can cause serious psychological and developmental harm, especially in children and people with mental illness. Amy Fettig, senior staff counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the Ohio settlement shows that the nation might finally be waking up to that fact.

“It is a nationwide signal that what once was a routine practice is no longer acceptable to the Department of Justice under the law,” Amy Fettig told The Nation. “This is an important first step. Ohio is the first state, but it certainly isn’t going to be the last.”

The DOJ first investigated Ohio juvenile facilities in 2007, finding “constitutional deficiencies in the state’s use of physical force, mental health care, grievance investigation and processing and use of seclusion.” Ohio DYS entered into consent decrees in 2008 with the DOJ and private plaintiffs to stop the unlawful seclusion of juvenile inmates.

But a review of data in 2013 found that the state continued to routinely isolate youth battling mental health problems. In the second half of 2013 alone, Ohio DYS secluded 229 boys with mental health needs for almost 60,000 hours total.

A 2012 study by the Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention found that more than one-third of youth in custody have reported being isolated at some point. Of those, fifty-five percent said they were isolated for more than twenty-four hours. The majority of those isolated said they had never talked with a counselor since arriving at their facility.

UPDATE (5/22/2014 10:15 am): The US Supreme Court on Wednesday indefinitely stayed the execution of Missouri death row prisoner Russell Bucklew, permitting an appeal in a lower court to go forward. "As a panel of the Eighth Circuit recognized, Mr. Bucklew presented strong medical evidence—that the Missouri Department of Corrections failed to contest—showing the likelihood of unnecessary pain and suffering beyond what is constitutionally permissible," said Cheryl Pilate, on of Bucklew's attorneys, in a statement. "Today's stay of execution will give the lower federal courts time to consider Mr. Bucklew's claim that his execution would violate his rights under the Eighth Amendment to be free from cruel and unusual punishment."

***

UPDATE (5/21/2014, 12:06 am): There’s been a dramatic turn of events in the past hour, culminating in Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s granting a temporary stay of execution for Missouri death row prisoner Russell Bucklew. As CBS’s Andrew Cohen first reported, the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit voted seven-to-four to dissolve its stay of execution for Russell Bucklew less than two hours before his scheduled lethal injection on Wednesday, 12:01 am Central Time. Only three judges voted in the court’s previous ruling. Minutes after the appellate court’s decision, Justice Alito temporarily halted Bucklew’s execution, pending arguments from the state and defense. “It is ordered that execution of the sentence of death is hereby stayed pending further order of the undersigned or of the Court,” Alito wrote.

* * *

A federal appeals court halted the execution of a Missouri death row prisoner on Tuesday, just hours before he was scheduled to die.

Attorneys for convicted murderer and rapist Russell Bucklew, 46, argued that proceeding with the execution would put him at great risk of experiencing “excruciating” pain, due to a rare birth defect that causes vascular tumors to grow on his face and neck. He was scheduled for lethal injection on Wednesday at 12:01 am.

“We are deeply relieved that the panel of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals has granted a stay of execution for Russell Bucklew, who faced substantial risk of a prolonged, tortuous execution tonight due to his rare and serious medical condition,” said Cheryl Pilate, one of Bucklew’s attorneys, in a statement.

In a two-to-one ruling, the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit delayed Bucklew’s execution for sixty days.

“Bucklew’s unrebutted medical evidence demonstrates the requisite sufficient likelihood of unnecessary pain and suffering beyond the constitutionally permissible amount inherent in all executions,” judges Michael Melloy and Kermit Bye wrote in their ruling.

Bucklew suffers from a rare condition called cavernous hemangioma, which has caused him a lifetime of facial hemorrhaging. Dr. David Zivot, professor of Anesthesiology at Emory University, physically examined Bucklew earlier this month, and concluded that his condition would put him at risk of a “prolonged and extremely painful execution.” Zivot specified that tumors on Bucklew’s face and neck, symptomatic of his condition, could cause him to hemorrhage or gasp for air during a lethal injection. Two other physicians submitted affidavits supporting these claims.

The eleventh-hour order reverses a district court ruling, which argued that Bucklew should present an alternative method of execution if he believed that lethal injection would subject him to unconstitutional pain. The conservative Eighth Court of Appeals noted that Missouri had repeatedly refused to grant Bucklew a medical examination. Bucklew’s attorneys, who are representing him pro bono, paid Dr. Zivot to physically examine their client.

University of Chicago Police forcibly removed four protesters blocking the entrance of a hospital construction site Monday morning, the latest clash between university officials and community members asking for an adult trauma center in the city’s South Side.

There are no adult trauma centers in the Chicago’s South Side, where heavy gun violence has struck a toll on the community, especially black youth. The University of Chicago Medical Center (UCMC) treats trauma victims under sixteen, but closed such services to older patients in 1988. The nearest level one trauma centers from South Side are at Northwestern Medical Center downtown and Advocate Christ Medical Center in the Oak Lawn suburb, both about ten miles away.

Monday’s act of civil disobedience kicked off a week of action, organized by a coalition of community groups demanding that UCMC reopen its adult trauma center. The week will culminate on Friday with a march to the home of university president Robert Zimmer.

The Trauma Center Coalition timed its week of action to take place as University of Chicago officials prepare a bid to host Barack Obama’s presidential library. University administrators released a glowing study Monday, projecting that opening the Obama library in the South Side, the president’s hometown, would create 2,000 permanent jobs for Chicago. But activists say U of C should prioritize correcting the dearth of trauma centers in the area over its bid for the next presidential library.

“President Obama has tried to stop gun violence and create opportunities for young black men, meanwhile the University of Chicago sits in the center of a gun violence epidemic on the South Side and has shown that it does not value black life, by refusing to open a trauma center and save the lives of the young black men dying at their door,” said Victoria Crider, a high school senior and trauma center activist, in a statement.

Research shows that having a trauma center nearby can save lives in a community. A Northwestern University study identified South Side Chicago as a “relative trauma desert in Chicago’s regional trauma system that is associated with increased gunshot wound mortality.” According to a WBEZ investigation, patients from the area face a longer ambulance run time, on average 50 percent longer, than other city residents.

Young activists began pushing to reopen the trauma center in 2010, just months after a drive by shooting claimed the life of 18-year-old Damian Turner. Though Turner was gunned down four blocks from UCMC, an ambulance had to take him to the nearest trauma center, more than nine miles away at Northwestern Memorial Hospital downtown. Turner, a co-founder of the activist group Fearless Leading by the Youth, died at Northwestern ninety minutes after getting shot.

“We are protesting this week because its unfair for this community not to have a trauma center, its heartless,” said Sheila Rush, Turner’s mother, in a statement.

Hospital administrators say opening an adult trauma center would be too expensive, suggesting that it would have to come at the cost of other services, such as UCMC’s neonatal intensive care unit and its burn unit.

“Developing a Level 1 trauma center would be a massive undertaking, requiring significant resources and support, as well as a complex decision-making process involving the city, the state, and Chicago’s trauma network,” UCMC said in a statement.

Activists don’t buy that claim, pointing to the hospital’s $782 million endowment, as well as a $4.5 billion capital campaign announced this week by President Zimmer.

A Missouri death row prisoner on Friday requested for a videographer to record his upcoming execution, which he claims is likely to bring him tortuous pain due to a medical condition.

Russell Bucklew, 45, has a congenital defect called hemangioma, which causes clumps of malformed blood vessels to grow in his neck, throat and head. Bucklew’s lawyers say his condition will likely cause him to hemorrhage and choke during his execution by lethal injection, scheduled for May 21. Dr. Joel B. Zivot, an anesthesiologist who examined Bucklew, supported this claim in a written affidavit.

Bucklew was convicted of the 1996 murder of Michael Sanders, as well as kidnapping and raping his ex-girlfriend.

Attorneys say taping Bucklew’s execution would provide key evidence “to better examine whether Missouri’s lethal injection procedures are ‘sure or very likely to cause serious illness and needless suffering’ in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution.”

“If Missouri officials are confident enough to execute Russell Bucklew, they should be confident enough to videotape it.” Cheryl A. Pilate, one of Mr. Bucklew’s attorneys, said in a statement. “It is time to raise the curtain on lethal injections.”

Bucklew is also challenging a Missouri law that shields key information about the state’s execution procedure. Missouri’s secrecy statute protects the anonymity of anyone serving on an “execution team,” including the state’s lethal injection drug supplier. Other states, including Oklahoma and Georgia, recently passed similar laws. Bucklew’s attorneys cite Oklahoma’s botched execution of Clayton Lockett last month, which caused him to writhe and gasp in pain, as the “inevitable” consequence of carrying out the death penalty under a shroud of secrecy.

Bucklew’s motion comes one day after several prominent news organizations filed a landmark lawsuit challenging Missouri’s execution secrecy statute. The Guardian US, the Associated Press and three local newspapers—The Kansas City Star, the Springfield News-Leader and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch—say citizens have a First Amendment right to know the “type, quality and source of drugs” used to execute prisoners in their name.

According to The Guardian US, the lawsuit is the first known First Amendment challenge to a death penalty secrecy statute.

US Attorney General Eric Holder on Wednesday called for an end to the “excessive” use of solitary confinement in juvenile facilities, especially condemning the practice of isolating youth who suffer from mental illness.

“Solitary confinement can be dangerous, and a serious impediment to the ability of juveniles to succeed once released,” Holder said in a video statement, posted to the Justice Department’s website. “At a minimum, we must work to curb the overreliance on seclusion of youth with disabilities.”

Holder cites a 2012 study by the Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention finding that nearly half, 47 percent to be precise, of the nation’s juvenile facilities lock youth in isolation. Another report from the same office found that more than one-third of youth in custody reported being isolated, with 55 percent saying it was longer than twenty-four hours.

“This practice is particularly detrimental to young people with disabilities—who are at increased risk under these circumstances of negative effects including self-harm and even suicide,” Holder said. “In fact, one national study found that half of the victims of suicides in juvenile facilities were in isolation at the time they took their own lives, and 62 percent of victims had a history of solitary confinement.”

Juan E. Méndez, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, said last year that solitary confinement can amount to torture and called for an “absolute ban” on the practice for juveniles and people battling disabilities.

Holder’s statement comes two months after the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division sought a court order to prevent Ohio’s juvenile corrections system from unlawfully isolating youth with mental illness. The DOJ’s request reported that the state had sent more than 229 boys with mental health needs to seclusion for a total of almost 66,000 hours. One boy spent nearly 2,000 hours in seclusion, while another was isolated for twenty-one straight days. In February, the DOJ criticized a juvenile facility in Contra County, California, for overzealously using solitary confinement.

UPDATE 6:00 PM: The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has stayed the execution of Robert Campbell two hours before he was set to die at 6 pm Central time today. In an opinion, the court decided that new evidence of Campbell’s intellectual disability shows “possible merit to warrant a fuller exploration by the district court.” It was recently revealed that state officials failed to turn over the results of two IQ tests suggesting Campbell may be ineligible for execution. “Given the state’s own role in creating the regrettable circumstances that led to the Fifth Circuit’s decision today, the time is right for the State of Texas to let go of its efforts to execute Mr. Campbell, and resolve this case by reducing his sentence to life imprisonment,” said Robert Owen, Campbell’s attorney, in a statement.

***

If Texas carries out a scheduled execution this evening, it will be the first state to put an inmate to death since a botched execution in Oklahoma two weeks ago left an inmate gasping and writhing in pain.

Robert James Campbell, 41, convicted of rape and murder in 1991, is set to die by lethal injection today at 6 pm Central time.

The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit yesterday denied an appeal that argued Texas’s refusal to disclose its drug supplier puts Campbell at risk of substantial pain. Another pending appeal argues that Campbell is not mentally competent for execution.

Here are some things to keep in mind as Texas approaches zero hour for tonight’s scheduled execution:

Like Oklahoma, Texas refuses to disclose the source of its execution drugs.

Texas purchased a new batch of execution drugs in March, but refused to say where it bought them, arguing that disclosing such information could endanger the supplier.

But Campbell’s attorneys argue that access to key information about the drug source is necessary “to ensure a humane, non-torturous execution.” They cite last month’s bungled execution in Oklahoma as the consequence of conducting executions under a shroud of secrecy.

Since pharmaceutical companies, predominantly based in Europe, stopped allowing their products to be used for the death penalty, states have turned to loosely regulated compounding pharmacies for execution drugs. Attorneys and death penalty critics say relying on made-to-order drugs to execute inmates always puts them at some risk of encountering unconstitutional pain.

Robert Campbell has an IQ of 69. Courts typically set the cutoff for executions at 70.

In another appeal, Campbell’s attorneys contend that their client is intellectually disabled, and therefore ineligible for execution. A medical evaluation last month found that Campbell has an IQ of 69. Clinicians consider an IQ of 70 or below as indicative of mental disability. The US Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that the execution of intellectually disabled persons violates the Eighth Amendment.

Attorneys also recently discovered that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) previously withheld two other IQ scores that put their client within range of intellectual disability.

The Arc, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, wrote a letter to Texas Governor Rick Perry asking him to commute Campbell’s sentence to life without parole.

“To ignore experts and cross the line drawn by a more than decade-old Supreme Court ruling shakes the foundation of our legal system for people with intellectual disabilities,” the letter states. “The Arc asks the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to take up this case immediately to ensure that Mr. Campbell’s disability is taken into account and justice can truly be served.”

Campbell, a black man, was prosecuted in a town criticized for “overt racial bias in capital case selection.”

Attorneys mention in their appeal that Campbell was prosecuted in Harris County, Texas, during a time where prosecutors disproportionately sought the death penalty for African-Americans. A University of Maryland study found that between 1992 and 1999 the county pursued capital punishment for blacks at three and a half times the rate of whites with similar cases.

Activists launched a Mother’s Day “Week of Action” campaign on Friday to support Marissa Alexander, the Florida woman facing sixty years in prison for firing warning shots to ward off her abusive husband.

Alexander was initially convicted of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, despite the fact that her husband had attacked her and nobody was injured, and sentenced to twenty years in prison. A circuit judge overturned that conviction on appeal, and now Florida State Attorney Angela Corey is seeking a sixty-year prison sentence for Alexander. A hearing has been set for May 16 to determine whether Alexander qualifies for another “stand your ground” hearing. Jury selection for her retrial is scheduled to begin on July 21.

Members of Free Marissa Now, an advocacy group, demonstrated outside of Corey’s office Friday, inviting people to send cards to Alexander. They also launched a social media campaign to raise funds for her legal defense.

The group also hopes to shed light on the impact of mass incarceration on women. The female prison population grew 832 percent from 1977 to 2007, about double the growth rate of male prisons. Seventy percent of incarcerated women are mothers, the majority of whom served as primary caretakers before they were separated from their children. Alexander, a mother of two teenage twins and a 3-year-old daughter, will spend the holiday under house arrest.

We spoke with Alisa Bierria, an activist with the Free Marissa Now campaign and PhD candidate at Stanford University, about Alexander’s case and the “Week of Action.” (This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.)

Can you tell me a little about this Mother’s Day campaign?

Marissa Alexander is a proud mother of three, including teenage twins and a 3-year-old daughter. She had given premature birth to her youngest child nine days before she was forced to defend her life after being attacked by her abusive estranged husband. When she was incarcerated for almost three years for defending herself, she was forced away from her children, including a baby who was still breastfeeding. Her reality as a mother is central to her experience of violence from both her husband and the state. We launched the Mother’s Day Week of Action as a way to build support for Marissa and to highlight the ways in which issues of mothering and reproductive justice really shapes her case and experiences of both domestic violence and incarceration. Those issues are intertwined for so many mothers in the United States, so we wanted to help people make the connections.

What is the plan for the campaign?

We’re starting today. Jacksonville-based organizers will be tabling today in front of State Prosecutor’s Angela Corey’s office. Tabling in front of Ms. Corey’s office is an expression of resistance to her continued prosecution and unjust targeting of this mother. Organizers will have information to hand out and Mother’s Day cards to mail to Marissa, so people can send her their support, hopefully reducing the isolation she’s experiencing while under house arrest. We’ll also encourage people to donate to the Marissa Alexander Legal Defense Fund for her trial, still scheduled for July 28. She’s facing $250,000 in legal fees, and that’s with a pro bono legal team.

Nationally and internationally, we’re inviting people to send Mother’s Day cards to Marissa and other mothers facing prison, violence, or who just need extra support. We invite people to spread the word about Marissa’s case, and share resources about the relationship between mothering and pregnancy, mass incarceration and domestic violence with their communities. We want people to know that this isn’t only impacting Marissa, but its impacting thousands and thousands of other women and parents.

You mentioned that the campaign intends to tie Marissa’s experience to the issue of women, mass incarceration and reproductive justice more broadly. Could you expand on that connection?

First, the majority of women in prison, about 70 percent, are mothers. 1.3 million children have mothers who are in jail, in prison or on probation. When women are incarcerated, it’s particularly devastating to children and families because they tend to be the primary caretakers. When we think about mass incarceration and who is being put in prison and why, we really have to understand that people behind bars are not just individuals that exist without any community or family or people depending on them…. Prisons create a devastating ripple effect across families and communities. On Mother’s Day, we want to celebrate all mothers, including those who are being disappeared into prisons. The US leads the world in the numbers of people caged and, for decades, black women were one of the fastest-growing groups of incarcerated people. Black mothers, in particular, are experiencing the brunt of mass incarceration policies.

Additionally, prison itself enacts reproductive violence. Last year, we learned that people in California women’s prisons were being coerced into being sterilized. In thirty-three states, it’s shockingly legal to shackle incarcerated women while they are in labor. Prisons have a profoundly violent impact on the experience of mothering and giving birth, and reproductive health in general. For Marissa, as a result of being incarcerated and targeted by state prosecutors, her abusive estranged husband currently has custody over her youngest child. To really support mothers, we must urgently address the ways that the prison crisis and domestic violence shape their lives.

* * *

Click here for more information on Marissa Alexander and this Mother’s Day campaign.

Lawmakers in Minnesota and Louisiana overwhelmingly passed bills this month barring people convicted of domestic violence from possessing or purchasing firearms, both states joining a national movement to keep guns out of abusers’ hands.

Minnesota’s bill, signed by Gov. Mark Dayton into law Monday, would expand existing handgun restrictions for convicted abusers to include rifles and shotguns and also prohibit anyone subject to a temporary restraining order from possessing a firearm. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is expected to sign a similar bill, which passed both statehouses unanimously. In recent months, Wisconsin and Washington also passed gun restrictions for domestic abusers with broad, bipartisan support, bringing the tally to four successful proposals this year.

Think Progress’s Nicole Flatlow notes that this wave of legislation comes after years of opposition from the National Rifle Association, which recently changed its position on domestic violence legislation. The NRA actively fought against Washington’s proposal for nearly a decade, successfully defeating bills in 2004 and 2010, before quietly approving this year’s bill. A Huffington Post analysis tied the NRA’s change of tune to public support for such legislation, as well as a recently launched effort to appeal to women.

Federal law already prohibits most people subject to permanent restraining orders from owning or purchasing guns, but the statute does not apply to temporary restraining orders and is rarely enforced to begin with.

More than two-thirds of perpetrators who killed their spouses or ex-spouses between 1980 and 2008 used a firearm to carry out the act, according to the Justice Department. In many cases, the perpetrator was already subject to a protective restraining order.

Evidence suggests that laws restricting domestic abusers from possessing guns can have a significant impact. A 2010 study, published in the journal Injury Prevention, connected such laws to a 19 percent reduction in intimate partner homicides. In an investigation of gun deaths in Washington, New York Times reporter Michael Luo found that the victim in five instances, all women, had obtained protective orders within the month that they were killed. During a three-year span in Minnesota, more than thirty people subject to active restraining orders were convicted of assaults involving guns.

The American Immigration Council (AIC) released a report today suggesting that US Border Patrol agents and supervisors who physically, verbally or sexually abuse migrants systemically escape with total impunity.

The DC-based organization reviewed 806 complaints of abuse by Border Patrol agents and supervisors between January 2009 to January 2012, looking at incidents that occurred within 100 miles of the US-Mexico border. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the umbrella agency for Border Patrol, took no action on ninety-seven percent of fully-processed complaints. Just thirteen complaints led to any action. Of those thirteen, six resulted in counseling, two in oral reprimands and another two in written reports. Only one unnamed agent was suspended as a result of an “excessive use of force” complaint. Here’s a visual breakdown, courtesy of AIC:

“These stark findings exemplify the culture of impunity that prevails at CBP,” Melissa Crow, director of the council’s Legal Action Center, toldThe New York Times. “Given the tremendous resources appropriated to CBP, the agency must do a better job of holding its officers accountable.”

The report highlights a few cases that illustrate the “culture of impunity” at CBP. An agent who allegedly hit an undocumented migrant’s head against a rock, causing a hematoma, was disciplined with counseling. In another case, a pregnant woman claims that a border agent kicked her during an apprehension, causing her to miscarry. Yet another detainee alleges that an agent said, “Don’t move or I’ll kill you,” as he was being arrested. In these latter two cases, neither alleged perpetrator faced disciplinary action.

The AIC notes that the CBP data, obtained through a federal public records request, accounts for only a “small fraction” of US Border Patrol abuse incidents. The report does not include complaints filed outside of CBP’s internal affairs division, such as civil rights lawsuits—not to mention abuse incidents that never got reported.

Criticism of abuse at CBP has been mounting in recent years, after a spate of killings compelled advocates and lawmakers to call for more transparency and accountability at the agency. At least twenty-one people since 2010 have been killed in shooting incidents involving Border Patrol agents. CBP plans to add another 2,000 border agents over the next two years. An independent review of CBP’s use of force procedures, leaked to the Los Angeles Times earlier this year, blasted the agency for a “lack of diligence” in handling use-of-force incidents.

In today’s report, AIC calls for an independent review of CBP’s complaint procedures, noting that many unresolved complaints from the organization’s review had been pending for more than a year. As of January 2012, at least one complaint had been active for more than 900 days. Advocacy groups say the report confirms their experience dealing with the overly complicated complaint procedure.

“There is no one way to file a complaint. How to file a complaint is unclear. When we do file a complaint, we rarely get a response,” said Vicki Gaubeca, director of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico.

Based on the report’s findings, a coalition of advocacy groups released a set of recommendations to make it easer to file border-related complaints. The groups, including the ACLU, Women’s Refugee Commission and others, recommends that the Department of Homeland Security, which governs over the CBP, streamline its complaint processes by establishing a single online forum, as well as a toll-free hotline, to file complaints.

Oklahoma’s top prison official on Thursday released a timeline of the botched execution of Clayton Lockett, who died of a heart attack Tuesday after a failed procedure. In a letter, Oklahoma Department of Corrections Director Robert Patton also recommended that the state halt all executions, pending an independent review of its lethal injection protocol.

Here are the letter’s biggest revelations, as well as some other recent developments in this story:

The morning of Lockett’s execution was marked by chaos.

Prison officials tasered Lockett the day of his execution, after he refused to be restrained for medical X-rays. Shortly after, medical officials observed that Lockett had lacerated himself on his right arm. He was sent to the prison health center to get his wounds treated. A doctor determined that he would not need sutures.

The lethal drugs were administered to Lockett via his groin, a rare method that requires extensive experience and training.

A medical technician had serious trouble finding a suitable vein on Lockett’s body to insert the IV. After determining that his arms, legs and feet offered “no viable point of entry,” the technician inserted the line in Lockett’s groin. This whole process, from searching Lockett’s body to inserting the IV, took fifty-one minutes. The New York Timesconfirmed with a Columbia University anesthesiologist that placing an IV in the groin can be especially painful and requires “extensive experience, training and credentialing.” The public doesn’t know anything about the technician’s qualifications because state law shields the identities of personnel involved in executions.

Experts are raising doubts about the DOC’s claim that Lockett’s vein collapsed.

The night of the botched execution, Robert Patton told reporters that Lockett’s vein collapsed during the procedure, causing officials to halt the process. The timeline provided Thursday corroborates this version of events, saying that about twenty minutes after the execution began, a doctor “checked the IV and reported the blood vein had collapsed.”

But Dr. Joel Zivot, an Emory University anesthesiologist, expressed to the Times that this theory is “almost certainly incorrect.” Zivot explained that finding the femoral vein is especially difficult, since it is not visible from the surface.

Madeline Cohen, an attorney representing death row inmate Charles Warner, whose execution was postponed after Tuesday’s botching, said in a statement, “[T]he timeline the Department of Corrections has released strongly indicates that the femoral IV was never properly inserted, and the drugs were injected into Mr. Lockett’s flesh, rather than his veins.”

Oklahoma’s prison chief is calling for an independent investigation of the botched execution, as well as an indefinite stay of all executions until the state refines its protocol.

On Tuesday, Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin stayed the execution of Charles Warner, another death row inmate, for fourteen days. Fallin has said that she will extend that stay up to sixty days if the investigation is not completed in time.

“It will take several days or possibly a few weeks to refine the new protocols. Once written, staff will require extensive training and understanding of new protocols before an execution can be scheduled,” Patton said.

Anti–death penalty advocates in other states are paying close attention.

Officials in Missouri, Texas and Ohio have all said the incident in Oklahoma will not affect planned executions in their respective states. But attorneys in each ofthosestates have all cited Lockett’s death in calling for moratoriums on capital punishment.

The planned execution of Russell Bucklew on May 21 raises particularly pressing concerns. Dr. Zivot said Bucklew has a medical condition that is characterized by malformed blood vessels, putting him at risk for “extreme or excruciating pain” during an intravenous execution.

“Missouri is at grave risk of repeating the type of botched procedure we just saw in Oklahoma,” said attorneys Cheryl Pilate and Lindsay Runnels in a statement. “Department of Corrections officials are operating with utter disregard of our client’s medical condition, and their continued secrecy exponentially increases the risk that Missouri will carry out a failed or botched execution.”

Update (4:30 pm): During a news conference today, President Obama called the botched execution in Oklahoma “deeply troubling.” Obama also called on Attorney General Eric Holder to conduct an “analysis” of the execution. He reaffirmed his support for capital punishment in “certain circumstances where a crime is so terrible that the application of the death penalty may be appropriate.”

Before Jose Antonio Vargas came out publicly as an undocumented immigrant in 2011, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist was already filming the moments leading up to his big reveal. During an early scene of Documented: A Film by an Undocumented Immigrant, Vargas speaks about the DREAM Act with journalism students at Mountain View High School in California, where he once co-edited the school paper. “I’m going to tell you something that I haven’t told a lot of people,” Vargas says. He announces his intention to come out of the shadows, through his now-famous New York Times Magazine essay and to launch “a whole campaign about what it means to be an American.”

Since then, Vargas has toured the country with his advocacy group Define American to change the national conversation about immigration. Documented follows Vargas, from his move to the United States in 1993 through his career as a successful journalist to his current role as perhaps the most high-profile undocumented immigrant in America. Vargas’s relationship with his mother, who he hasn’t seen in more than twenty years, also figures prominently in the film.

We spoke with Mr. Vargas by phone last Thursday about Documented, his advocacy and the future of the immigrant rights movement. (This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.)

I read on Facebook that you’re showing Documented at a church in Louisville, Kentucky, tonight.

The campaign director of Define American is actually a minister and he lives in Louisville. So, tonight, for the first time, we’re looking at immigration through a Christian lens.

I can’t believe it. We’re approaching the third year of Define American. The day The New York Times posted my essay on the website is when our organization was born. From the very beginning, the goal was creating a cultural space to have a conversation beyond the usual immigration frameworks: political, partisan, US-Mexico border, “illegal.” A year after I came out, we had the Time magazine cover. That was the first time you had a major publication put undocumented people on the cover saying, “We are Americans, just not legally.” Our organization occupies a unique space within the immigrant movement. To me, it’s bigger than immigration. It’s about citizenship. That’s why we called the organization Define American. We didn’t call it DefineImmigrant.

What did you learn while making this film?

When I outed myself a few years ago, after I didn’t hear from the government, there was a part of me that thought, “Somebody from ICE or INS is going to get in touch with me.” Then nothing was said. Immediately I started traveling and I started filming and filming and filming. I’ve done over 200 events in forty-two states in almost three years. I would say two things. One: I underestimated the gap between what Americans know about immigration and what the reality is about immigration. I had assumed that there was a gap. I would not have anticipated that it would have been this big. People have no idea. The fact that people ask me, “Why don’t you just make yourself legal?” or “Why don’t you wait in the back of the line?” That proves to me that fundamentally, the American people do not have an understanding of how immigration works in this country.

The second thing that I found the most tragic is—when people find out I am not Mexican, or that I’m Filipino—once they find out that I’m not what they think I’m supposed to be, they start talking badly to me about Mexicans. I did not anticipate the level of how many people use the word illegal and Mexican interchangeably. Just assuming that somebody who is Latino or somebody who is brown is Mexican and then making the assumption that he appeared illegal. I mean, that is a tragedy. That is a tragedy with such political, cultural and personal implications that I cannot even begin to describe.

Why did you decide to center the film on your story, and in particular, your relationship with your mother?

The hardest decision to make about this film was to make it this personal. That is not at all what I was planning to do. This is my second documentary. I’m working on a third project that’s going to be related to this. I feel like my creative, artistic life just started. It started three years ago when I could finally own up to who I am and claim myself and call myself an American in front of other people without feeling a sense of shame.

Originally, I thought I was going to do the Inside Job of immigration reform. Then I started watching C-Span and getting clips of politicians talking about immigration reform and why all these illegals should be out of this country. And then I think, “Do I really want to politicize an already over-politicized issue?” Whenever you hear about immigration reform, it’s always from the perspective of politicians, running for some kind of office or running away from themselves. I don’t know what. But that’s always been the case.

So I go, “All right, I’m not going to do that.” So I thought I was going to do “Waiting for Superman meets the DREAM Act.” Then when I started filming, I knew I wanted to do that. Then I made the tough decision to include my mother and basically started connecting these other pieces of the puzzle to my own life. That’s when the film took on a different life. As any documentary film director will tell you, when you’re doing a film like this, you can’t really force what it is. It needs to be what it needs to be. Film in many ways is very literal. When I’m writing, I can always play around with tense. I can always make past present. I can always kind of manipulate and I can always be delusional in a way that’s completely self-serving. With film, it’s like, the camera can’t really lie. It can manipulate to a certain extent. When I connected with my mom on Skype, I couldn’t have written that. There was no writing done. I didn’t even have the language for it.

That was one of the most powerful scenes for me.

I remember watching that scene when we were editing. I had to watch it, and it was like seeing myself for the first time. I’m a 32-year-old man. I’m looking at that scene and thinking, “Oh my god, I’m 12 and I’m on that plane by myself again. And you know, I miss my mom.” Ever since I was younger—when I found out I was this gay, Filipino, “illegal” person that this country thinks I am—I have always wanted to be in control. And I have always wanted to show that nothing can break me. You can put in front of me every challenge, and I’m going to do it. I’m going to cover a presidential campaign. I’m going to write for The New Yorker. I’m going to land an interview no one else is going to get. I’m going to do all these things you said I cannot do. And I never wanted to show any sort of pain or vulnerability. That’s not unique to me. I think all of us, we want to be strong. We want to be in control. This film has been for me, in a way, really cleansing.

You’ve said openly that you’re relatively privileged for an undocumented immigrant. What are the limits to telling your story?

I’m very clear from the very beginning about who I am and who I am not. I have no control, whatsoever, on how people perceive me, from the right or the left. All I have control over is who I say I am. This is why, from the very beginning, I didn’t want to do a film about myself. I was questioning, like, “Who is going to relate to this person?” I am, let’s be honest, at an incredibly privileged position to do what I do. I am probably the most privileged undocumented immigrant in America. While people get deported everyday, what did I do? I made a film. But guess what? I think there is no limit to empathy. There is no limit to humanity. This is why I included my mother and the complexity of that relationship. How do you explain being separated from your mother for twenty years. This is who I am. And this is what the system has done to me, and this is what I’ve done to myself.

There are many, many more stories that need to be told. This is only one of them. There are some aspects of the film that are kind of journalistic in the way they’re framed. Like the scene in Iowa when I’m talking to Romney supporters. And the film, I think, also works in the way that it tries to break misconceptions—about the fact that we pay taxes, about the fact that this is not totally a Mexican/Latino issue.

Ninety minutes of a documentary cannot tell the whole story. But it tells one story, from one perspective. And I get to say that this is a film that is produced and directed by an undocumented person and I have the privilege of telling my own story in the most honest way I can.

Tell me a little bit about how your status as an undocumented immigrant relates to your work in journalism.

Look, when I was growing up—it’s not like I was a kid and wanted to be a journalist. I was really attracted to movies. When I was growing up, learning about America to me was watching movies and watching television. I was really fortunate because I grew up in an area in Mountain View, California, with well-funded, well-stocked libraries. I started watching documentaries by Frederick Wiseman. I’ve always gravitated towards Mike Nichols, watching Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? countless times. I was exposed to a lot of films before I had even wanted to write. To this day, writing, for me, doesn’t come naturally. Because I never feel like I have enough words. And I never feel like I’m good enough at it.

And then I discovered journalism, and the only reason why I gravitated towards it is because my name would be on a piece of paper. As an undocumented person it means that I don’t have a document that says I’m supposed to be here. But then I thought, “Well, wait a second. If I’m a writer and have a byline, doesn’t that mean I exist on a piece of paper?” So that’s why I started writing. I thought I could write myself to America and I could just keep writing. Journalism, for me, has always been a way of validating my existence. Although I was always ultimately hiding. My name is on a piece of paper, but I’m not supposed to be here.

There are some people in the journalism industry, some of them my own friends, who don’t consider me a journalist anymore. They say that I am now an advocate. And then usually I ask, “What do you think I’m advocating for?” Journalists sometimes use the word advocacy with this kind of like, “Back over there.” I’m sorry. Isn’t Ezra Klein an advocate for something? Isn’t Nate Silver advocating for something? Why is it that a journalist who is a person of color, or a gay journalist or an undocumented journalist—when they do journalism, it’s called advocacy?

What did you make of Jeb Bush’s recent statement that immigration is an “act of love?”

Define America is a media and cultural organization. I’m not about politics and I’m not about policy. And this is coming from somebody who used to be a political writer. I grew up, you know, in the era of Will and Grace and Ellen Degeneres. In an era when gay-straight alliances were formed in high schools across America. You cannot understate the importance of culture in changing politics. For me, politics is culture. I don’t care about immigration policy. I care about immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants who have been, for too long, under attack in this country. Jeb Bush made a cultural statement. “Immigration is an act of love”—that is a cultural statement. I cannot wait to show the film to Jeb Bush and President Bush. People forget: President Bush was the first president to give a primetime speech on immigration reform. This is one of the issues that he got right and wanted to get right. Jeb Bush made a cultural statement that got completely politicized. That was interesting. Again, I’m someone who has benefited from and grew up during the cultural shift that has made LGBT rights inevitable to this county. We are not there yet when it comes to immigrant rights. The culture has not shifted as much as it should. Getting on the cover of Time magazine is certainly a part of that. Making a film that is about undocumented immigrants is a part of that. Given that we have had a decade of immigration reform being wrapped in such political, partisan terms, I think that it’s time that artists and storytellers and culture-makers be front and center when it comes to this issue, which is a civil rights issue. And I cannot wait for the journalistic community to finally wake up when it comes to that.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

After all the traveling I’ve done, I think it’s proven to me more that a new America is definitely emerging. America is gayer—more and more gay people will continue to come out. More women are leaning in however they want to lean. We celebrated this year the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. Next year, we will be celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, championed by the Kennedy brothers, which irrevocably changed this country. That is why this country is as Asian and Latina as it is. That’s why this country looks like it does. The work that we do at Define American is to honor and represent the cultural shift and the birth of this new America. Three years ago when I outed myself in The New York Times, the question we asked is, “How do you define America?” That is the space, that I, as a filmmaker, as an artist, that’s what I want to occupy. In a country that is evolving and changing, demographically, culturally and politically. Not only am I an American journalist, I would like to think that I am an American filmmaker who happens to be of Filipino descent and who happens to be gay.

An Oklahoma inmate died of a heart attack Tuesday shortly after a botched execution using an untested combination of lethal injection drugs caused him to writhe and gasp, leading officials to postpone a second execution scheduled for the night.

Clayton D. Lockett, 38, reacted “violently” to the drugs after he was already declared unconscious, “kicking and grimacing” before officials lowered the chamber’s viewing room blinds and halted the execution, according to Tulsa World reporter Ziva Branstetter, who witnessed the process. Lockett was pronounced dead at 7:06 pm of a heart attack, forty-three minutes after the execution began.

“His body started to twitch, he mumbled something I couldn’t understand,” Dean Sanderford, an attorney representing Lockett, told CNN. “The convulsing got worse, it looked like his whole upper body was trying to lift off the gurney. For a minute, there was chaos.”

“His vein exploded,” said Oklahoma Department of Corrections Director Robert Patton, in a statement to reporters. Patton explained that it could not be determined how much of the drugs in the three-drug procedure made it into Lockett’s body. The combination had never before been used in an Oklahoma execution.

Republican Governor Mary Fallin ordered a fourteen-day stay of execution for Charles Warner, another condemned man who was scheduled to die at 8 pm Tuesday. She also called for a review of Oklahoma’s execution procedures “to determine what happened and why during this evening’s execution of Clayton Derrell Lockett.”

Lockett’s botched execution will surely intensify the nationwide debate over death penalty procedures, as states turn to poorly regulated compounding pharmacies to restock dwindling supplies of lethal injection drugs. Attorneys and advocates have warned for months that using drugs from unverified sources could cause inmates to experience cruel and unusual pain during executions. Earlier this year, an Ohio inmate gasped and snorted during a fifteen-minute execution process using an untested drug cocktail, while another Oklahoma inmate declared, “I can feel my whole body burning.”

Oklahoma is one of several states with statutes protecting the anonymity of lethal drug suppliers. Lockett and Warner had both filed appeals to compel the state to reveal its drug source. The state’s Supreme Court granted an indefinite stay of execution last Monday for the two condemned men, pending review of the law. The next day, Governor Fallin issued an executive order saying the state would defy the high court’s ruling and proceed with the executions anyway. And the day after, the state Supreme Court declared the secrecy statute constitutional, overturning a district court ruling, and lifted the stay execution it had granted just two days prior.

“After weeks of Oklahoma refusing to disclose basic information about the drugs for tonight’s lethal injection procedures, tonight, Clayton Lockett was tortured to death,” said Madeline Cohen, a federal public defender representing Charles Warner. “Until much more is known about tonight’s failed experiment of an execution, no execution can be permitted in Oklahoma.”

Cohen and other attorneys have called for a third-party investigation of Lockett’s death.

“In Oklahoma’s haste to conduct a science experiment on two men behind a veil of secrecy, our state has disgraced itself before the nation and the world,” said Ryan Kiesel, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma, in a statement.

A new study finds that about one in twenty-five people sentenced to death in the United States has likely been convicted erroneously, meaning it is “all but certain” that American corrections departments have executed “several” innocent defendants since 1973.

“The rate of erroneous conviction of innocent criminal defendants is often described as not merely unknown but unknowable,” writes lead author and University of Michigan Law professor Samuel Gross. “We use survival analysis to model this effect, and estimate that if all death-sentenced defendants remained under sentence of death indefinitely at least 4.1 percent would be exonerated.”

The landmark study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that more than 200 innocent people have been sentenced to death since 1973. It concludes that most of the nation’s innocent death-sentenced prisoners have not been exonerated and that “many—including the great majority of those who have been resentenced to life in prison—probably never will be.”

Researchers based their estimate on thirty-one years worth of death penalty data, collected from three separate sources. Between 1973 and 2004, judges handed out 7,482 death sentences. Of those, 1,320 defendants were eventually executed, while 117 were exonerated, according to the study. A higher rate of death row prisoners, about 36 percent, were removed from death row and resentenced to life imprisonment. If the current trends persist, more than two-thirds of death row inmates will be granted reduced sentences.

The high overturn rate for death sentences is key to the authors’ claim that “the great majority of innocent defendants who are convicted of capital murder in the United States are neither executed nor exonerated.” Defendants taken off death row had an exoneration rate of about one-eighth of those still under threat of execution. Gross says that’s because fewer resources are devoted to exonerating capital defendants once execution is taken out of the equation.

The study refutes much lower false conviction rates cited by judges and lawyers in the past. Perhaps most notably, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia suggested in 2007 that the wrongful conviction rate is “.027 percent—or, to put it another way, a success rate of 99.973 percent.”

“This would be comforting, if true. In fact, the claim is silly,” Gross writes. “Scalia’s ratio is derived by taking the number of known exonerations at the time, which were limited almost entirely to a small subset of murder and rape cases, using it as a measure of all false convictions (known and unknown), and dividing it by the number of all felony convictions for all crimes, from drug possession and burglary to car theft and income tax evasion.”

Read the study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, here.

Amid mounting political pressure from lawmakers and state executives, Oklahoma’s Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that two death row inmates are not entitled to know the source of lethal injection drugs that will be used to execute them.

In a ruling, the state’s high court also lifted a stay of execution for Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner that it had issued just two days prior. The two men are scheduled to die by lethal injection on April 29.

State supreme courts typically take weeks or months to rule on constitutional challenges. Yesterday’s decision took a little over forty-eight hours. The timing of the opinion has raised suspicions that the court was motivated by political pressures.

“I can only conclude that the Supreme Court caved in the face of unconstitutional and uncalled for attacks by the legislature and the governor,” said Madeline Cohen, an attorney representing Mr. Warner.

Governor Mary Fallin issued an executive order Tuesday contesting the Court’s “constitutional authority” to issue a stay of execution, even though the Supreme Court only acted after Oklahoma’s top criminal court denied jurisdiction over the matter. And just hours before the Supreme Court issued its opinion, Republican state Representative Mike Christian introduced a resolution to impeach the five justices who voted in favor of delaying the executions, accusing them of “willful neglect of duty.”

While courts in Missouri and Texas have struck down challenges to execution secrecy statutes, a trial court ruled Oklahoma’s to be unconstitutional, under grounds that the law denied inmates access to the courts. Advocates say transparency over the source lethal drugs is critical to knowing whether they could inflict unnecessary pain, amounting to cruel and unusual punishment. Since European lawmakers stopped selling their drugs for capital punishment purposes, Oklahoma and death penalty states have turned to poorly-regulated compounding pharmacies to procure execution drugs.

UPDATE (4/23/2014, 8:39 pm): The Associated Press reports that the Oklahoma Supreme Court has lifted a stay of execution for Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner, rejecting their claim that they are entitled to know the source of the lethal injection drugs being used to execute them before they’re put to death.

* * *

Oklahoma is playing host to a constitutional showdown over the planned executions of two men, pitting the state’s Supreme Court against its Republican governor.

Underlying the debate is whether convicted murderers Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner should be informed of what drugs will be used to kill them before their executions are carried out. Their attorneys argue that shielding the identities of lethal injection drug suppliers violates inmates’ due process rights and drugs procured from unregulated compounding pharmacies could subject them to cruel and unusual punishment. Last month, a district court agreed, declaring the state’s execution secrecy statute unconstitutional.

Oklahoma’s Supreme Court issued indefinite stays of executions for Lockett and Warner on Monday, pending state appeals to the district court’s ruling. The next day, Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin asserted that the high court had stepped outside its “constitutional authority” in weighing in on the death penalty case.

She issued an executive order delaying Lockett’s execution by one week; it was originally planned for later that day. As it looks right now, Lockett, and presumably Warner, are both scheduled to die on April 29.

Here’s where things get confusing: the state Supreme Court stayed the exections only after weeks of tussling with the Court of Criminal Appeals over which legal body had constitutional jurisdiction over the case. In Oklahoma’s unique judicial system, the state Supreme Court handles civil cases. The Court of Criminal Appeals, which has refused to address the two death row inmates’ stay requests, traditionally serves as the high court on criminal cases.

“Here, the Court of Criminal Appeals’ refused to exercise its rightfully placed jurisdiction, and left this Court in an awkward position,” the majority justices wrote in their opinion. “As uncomfortable as this matter makes us, we refuse to violate our oaths of office and to leave the appellants with no access to the courts.”

Legal experts argue that Fallin does not have the constitutional or legal authority to invalidate, much less overturn, the Supreme Court. On those grounds, attorneys for Lockett and Warner filed a motion today to quash the governor’s orders.

“The order is a flagrant arrogation of this Court’s authority to say what the law is, and a patent violation of the constitutional separation of powers,” their motion reads.

Eric M. Freedman, a constitutional law professor and death penalty expert at Hofstra University, said the ongoing judicial battle distracts from the underlying issue: the question of constitutionality over Oklahoma’s secrecy statute, one of several laws in the country granting anonymoity to lethal injection drug providers.

“It highlights the desperation of a state trying to justify something unjustifiable,” Freedman told The Nation. “The bottom line is the state is heading for a day of reckoning in the Oklahoma Supreme Court as to whether it can defend this attempt to insulate its own actions by hiding them from judicial scrutiny.”

Sixty-eight percent of African-Americans live within thirty miles of a coal-fired power plant, the zone of maximum exposure to pollutants that cause an array of ailments, from heart disease to birth defects. Communities of color breathe in nearly 40 percent more polluted air than whites. African-American children are three times as likely to suffer an asthma attack.

The NAACP launched its Climate Justice Initiative address the stark numbers head on. Working in conjunction with Little Village Environmental Justice Organization and Indigenous Environmental Network, the Initiative published “Coal-Blooded: Putting Profits Before People” in 2012, which evaluated the impact of 378 coal-fired power plants on communities along racial and economic lines. “Just Energy Policies: Reducing Pollution and Creating Jobs,” released in December, looked at the energy policies of all fifty states through a civil rights lens.

We spoke with Jacqueline Patterson, executive director of the NAACP’s Climate Justice Initiative, about her organization’s work. (This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.)

Why did the NAACP launch the Climate Justice Initiative?

The NAACP launched the CJI because of a recognition of the impact both of climate change itself and how it disproportionately impacts marginalized communities, low-income communities and communities of color. We looked at how climate change violates the civil rights of those communities, whether it’s because of pre-existing vulnerabilities in the impact of disasters or whether its the redevelopment process and how lots of time and resource allocation is cut along political lines and folks are already disenfranchised. The actual drivers of climate change, whether its roadway pollution or traffic vehicles or if its polluted facilities like coal plants, are disproportionately affecting communities of color and low-income communities.

As your organization reports, 68 percent of African-Americans live within thirty miles of a coal-fired power plant. That’s pretty stark. How did we get here?

There’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation here. In some cases, the facilities were already there before the communities. The communities are-low income or low-wealth, and they moved into an area where property values are on average 15 percent lower because that’s what they can afford. That’s one dynamic. You also have companies choosing to build facilities where property values are lower and property values are lower in low-income communities, so we’ll see disproportionate placement in those communities. They’ll also choose communities where they won’t get political push back. You’ll see that kind of pattern everywhere. It’s tied to voter disenfranchisement and the lack of political power that communities of color have.

Civil rights isn’t usually one of the first things that come up in discussions about climate change. Why is that?

Clearly, traditional environmental analysis and messaging around climate change has dominated the airwaves. There are more resources for the Sierra Club and National Wildlife Federation, not to mention folks like Al Gore. With those groups, their focus is on glaciers, flora, fauna and wildlife. That has been the focus of climate change, historically.

When you’re marginalized in one way, you’re marginalized in many ways. The voices of frontline communities, the ones that are most impacted, usually don’t make it to the airwaves. That’s starting to change. Showtime is doing that series, Years of Living Dangerously. When I watch the news, all these different folks were talking about climate change and they were talking about it from a human impact angle. Whether it’s the polar vortex or these storms or wildfires or droughts or flooding or the landslide, all these events are impacting real people, so we’re seeing real dialogue around it.

What has been the significance of environmental disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, in elevating the climate justice angle?

What’s significant about disasters like Hurricane Katrina or even the flooding and tornadoes in Alabama and Mississippi a couple years ago is you start to see the differential impact and the differential response on communities of color. With Hurricane Katrina, it was more a story about the differential response, not as much of a story about climate change. It was before the wave of recognizing where we are in terms of the increase in extreme weather events. As these disasters become more frequent, we’ll see start to see more of an analysis around the differential impact through the lens of climate change.

Your research deals a lot with how climate policy impacts the health of communities of color. Want to talk a little about that?

I will say that the lack of climate policy is affecting health in communities of color. We are making some progress with the rules that are going to be introduced in June for existing coal-fired power plants and the carbon rules that were introduced last year for proposed coal-fired power plants. Just lessening the carbon in the atmosphere will save lives and prevent people from being harmed or sickened by the various impacts of climate change. There’s also the mercury and air toxics rule, which came out years ago, but is just now coming into enforcement. It’s a rule that addresses co-pollutants that come from these facilities, not just carbon dioxide. The same facilities that are driving climate change are also sickening communities with mercury, arsenic, lead and other things being emitted. So, policies that are comprehensive that look at all the ways these facilities are harming communities are important as well.

What we need to be looking at now is being much more aggressive around our emissions targets. We need to face the fact that climate change is here now and we need to pour public money into strengthening community resilience to the impact of climate change. There needs to be more funding for FEMA to do advanced forecasting and planning. Resources need to go to frontline communities so they’re in control of designing and implementing their own resilience plans. We need to think seriously, not just about disasters, which tend to get the most visibility, but also sea level rise and how we’re going to make sure communities are prepared for the waters that are going to overtaking land in parts of Louisiana, Alaska and places in between. But also, before that water overtakes the land and forces people to move, we need to deal with the fact that even right now, as we saw with Superstorm Sandy, storm surges resulting from sea-level rise is making any regular storm seem more intense. We need to be taking all of this into account in our local planning and our resources need to follow that.

We need to make sure that we are building a political system that is more inclusive. Currently, whether its Congress or the courts or the zoning board or the rural electric co-ops or the public utilities commissions, there is underrepresentation for communities that are most impacted by the decisions all of these decision-making bodies make. From litigation to adaptation, we need to make sure we have inclusive bodies that represent the voices of the people as these decisions are being made.

Your work explores the importance of making sure benefits from clean energy are equitable and reach communities of color. Could you talk a little bit about that?

We talked earlier about how 68 percent of African-Americans live within thirty miles of a coal-fired power plant and other frontline communities, such as indigenous Native American communities and Latino communities, are also right in the smog zones of these facilities. Just transitioning to a more energy-efficient economy and clean energy economy would benefit those communities in terms of having clean air to breathe, clean water to drink and clean land to live on. In addition to that, we also want to make sure that those communities are in decision-making spaces as we develop this economy, as well as revenue-generating positions. African-Americans spent $41 million on energy in 2009, but only 1 percent of African-Americans were in energy jobs and less than 1 percent of revenue in the energy sector was earned by African-Americans. Whatever room there is for estimation on either side of those statistics, they’re still fairly stark in saying not only are we being negatively impacted by the current fossil-fuel dominated portfolio, we’re also not even benefiting from the revenue or jobs in that sector, nor are we in positions of being able to have input in how those sectors advance and roll out.

As we transition to a new-energy economy, we need frontline communities, not just communities of color but also low-income communities, to be working in decision-making and revenue-generating positions within the industry.

Obviously your organization is part of this, but how do we get people of color excited and engaged in discussions about climate change?

Communities across the country are already organizing themselves to talk about this—whether its the Eastern Michigan Environmental Action Council in Detroit or the Asia Pacific Environmental Network in the Bay Area—they’re really coming together to talk about, not just the direct impact of climate change but how we need a holistic approach to how we organize our communities and political and economic systems. So we are having, at a local level, conversations about what we want for our communities and how this connects to a bigger picture. We’re talking about how we can be agents of change for our communities and how to connect to the greater landscape.

For example, when we talk about climate change, solutions to climate change, we are talking about green schools, which are more energy efficient, but also make people feel valued through education, retrofitting their school and making it the type of environment they want to work and learn in. We talk about local food movements, which both mitigate climate change, because we’re growing our own food and aren’t relying on trucks for transport, and provide education about climate change. We’re looking at comprehensive, holistic ways of both mitigating climate change and adapting to climate change that helps provide economic, social and cultural benefits to our communities.

According to Yahoo, the Obama administration also plans to reform the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney to prepare for the clemency push, which could include significant personnel changes. US pardon attorney Ronald Rodgers, who has been criticized for a stingy approach towards clemency, will likely step down as part of the effort.

“We’re thrilled that the administration is contemplating a very robust overhaul of the clemency process and also contemplating opening the process for many more deserving prisoners than its been available to in the past,” said Mary Price, general counsel of Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM). “But mercy is not a substitute for reform.”

The clemency overhaul is part of a broader effort by the Obama administration to scale back on harsh and disproportionate sentencing, dubbed the “Smart on Crime” initiative. In August, Attorney General Eric Holder directed prosecutors to stop seeking mandatory minimum sentences for some low-level drug offenders. The administration also endorses a bipartisan plan in Congress to reduce some mandatory minimums and grant prosecutors more discretion in sentencing nonviolent drug offenders.

The bodies of two homeless men were found Wednesday morning in Washington, DC, just a short drive away from the heart of the nation’s government.

City police said the likely cause of death was hypothermia, although a medical examiner has yet to determine an official cause. The bodies were discovered in a makeshift encampment about fifty feet from each other. After days of warm weather, DC was hit with a cold front Tuesday night, bringing snowfall and causing the city to issue a hypothermia alert.

“These deaths were entirely preventable, as are deaths by exposure and hypothermia that have been happening across the country,” said Jerry Jones, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. “It’s what happens when you don’t spend money on affordable housing and you have people living outdoors with the elements. This is the cost of not spending money on basic necessities.”

Yesterday’s tragedy comes off the heels of a “catastrophic” homeless crisis during this year’s brutal winter. A record number of DC families sought emergency shelter this year, maxing out the city’s available spots and forcing officials to place people in hotels and even recreation centers outfitted with cots. Advocates for the homeless say the surge of homeless families points to the need for longer-term solutions, such as rent subsidies and more affordable housing options.

“It’s twenty-eight years to get a one bedroom apartment in DC. There are no subsidized units available for most families and the rental market is pricing people out pretty rapidly,” Jones told The Nation.

DC, along with New York and Los Angeles, saw rising homelessness in recent years, bucking a national trend. The homeless population in DC rose more than 1,000 over the last six years, a 29 percent increase, according to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. New York saw a 23 percent increase during the same time frame.

North Carolina’s Supreme Court heard arguments Monday in the cases of four capital defendants who had their sentences commuted to life in prison under the state’s since-repealed Racial Justice Act (RJA). If the inmates lose, they could be sent back to death row.

The Racial Justice Act, passed in 2009, allowed death row inmates to challenge their sentences if they believed racial biases played a significant role before or during their trials. The state legislature narrowed the law in 2012 before Republican Governor Pat McCrory signed a repeal of RJA last year.

The state Supreme Court will review two separate cases involving three African-American men and one Lumbee Indian woman who all successfully argued in a lower court that racial biases affected prosecutors’ jury selection for their trials. The first case involves Marcus Robinson, who was the first prisoner to have his sentenced reduced under RJA, before it was amended to narrow the scope of permitted evidence proving racial discrimination. The second case involves Tilmon Golphin, Christina Walters and Quintel Augustine.

Attorneys representing the inmates cited a Michigan State University study finding that prosecutors struck qualified blacks from serving as jurors in capital cases at nearly twice the rate of other races from 1990 to 2010. About 53 percent of North Carolina’s death row inmates are black, despite only making up 22 percent of the state’s population.

Representing Tilmon Golphin, Quientel Augustine and Christina Walters, Attorney Jay Ferfuson presented handwritten jury selection notes from a prosecutor that suggested he viewed white and black jurors “through a different lens.” He described one potential juror as a “blk wino,” (sic) while another black juror from a “respectable” family was “ok.” Another prosecutor, when asked to explain why she struck some black jurors, read straight from a “cheat sheet” of defenses to accusations of discriminatory strikes.

The high court’s decisions could have far-reaching consequences for the more than 150 death row inmates in North Carolina who have filed for relief under RJA. The state has not executed anyone since 2006.

In a 2012 court order reducing the sentences of three of the defendants, Superior Court Judge Gregory Weeks explained the necessity of the Racial Justice Act.

“Our system of justice is still healing from the lingering effects of slavery and Jim Crow,” Weeks wrote. “In emerging from this painful history, it is more comfortable to rest on the status quo and to be satisfied with the progress already made. RJA calls upon the justice system to do more.”

Albuquerque police officers have engaged in a pattern of excessive force, too often using firearms and tasers against people who pose little to no danger, many of whom are mentally ill, according to a scathing review by the US Justice Department released Thursday.

On top of the troubling rate of excessive force incidents, the Albuquerque Police Department (APD) officers involved rarely face any sort of accountability for their actions, the report finds.

A review of deadly use of force incidents found that the majority of the twenty fatal shootings involving officers from 2009 to 2012 were unconstitutional. APD officers have shot thirty-seven people since 2010, a higher rate than NYPD officers, who cover a city sixteen times larger.

Albuquerque police officers also often use less-lethal force, such as tasers and takedown procedures, in ways that are unconstitutional. The review highlights a 2009 case where officers tased a man after he had poured gasoline on himself, setting him on fire.

The report blames “systemic deficiencies” for the high rate of excessive force incidents, chiefly the Albuquerque Police Department’s “failure to implement an objective and rigorous internal accountability system.”

In reviewing 200 police reports, federal investigators found that about one-third of the reports involved unreasonable uses of force. In contrast, APD only identified one percent from the same sample as unreasonable uses of force.

Inadequate training, poor leadership and a “culture of unjustifiable aggression” also contributed to the department’s excessive force problems, the report’s authors write.

“We are very concerned by the results of our investigation and look forward to working with the city of Albuquerque to develop a set of robust and durable reforms,” said Jocelyn Samuels, acting assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, in a statement. “Public trust has been broken in Albuquerque, but it can be repaired through this process.”

The report comes amid mounting frustration over the Albuquerque Police Department’s aggressive tactics, erupting last month in heated protests in the city streets. Demonstrators were reacting to a video showing APD officers fatally shooting a mentally ill, homeless man who had his back turned to the officers when shots were fired.

“The city breathes a sigh of relief this morning that the DOJ review justified a lot of community concerns,” said Patrick Davis, a former police officer who serves as executive director of ProgressNow New Mexico. “The community needs assurance that officers are trained and experienced and can demonstrate an appropriate use of force.”

Other city police departments, including those in Detroit and Seattle, have been subjected to federal oversight after Justice Department reviews. Albuquerque Mayor Richard Berry has already asked the city for $1 million to comply with any potential reforms resulting from the federal investigation.

Jonathan Fleming walked out of a New York courthouse a free man Tuesday after serving more than twenty-four years behind bars for a crime he did not commit.

“I feel wonderful,” Fleming told reporters. “I’m going to have dinner with my mother and my family and I’m going to live the rest of my life.”

Mr. Fleming, 51, has always maintained his innocence in the 1989 murder of Darryl Rush, claiming he was vacationing with his family at Disney World when the Brooklyn shooting occurred. After more than two decades of fighting Fleming’s appeals, the district attorney’s office finally believes his story.

Over the last year, investigators with the DA’s Conviction Integrity Unit uncovered key evidence corroborating Fleming’s Disney World alibi. They found a phone bill placing Fleming at an Orlando hotel four hours before Rush was fatally shot hundreds of miles away. And a local police report contains statements by hotel employees confirming Fleming’s stay.

Authorities did not turn over either document to Fleming’s trial attorneys when his case was tried in 1990.

“Where the hell was this evidence all these years, and why wasn’t it turned over until 25 years later?” attorney Taylor Koss said in an interview with The Huffington Post.

During his trial, attorneys presented family photos and videos of Fleming in Florida. Several family members who were on the trip also testified in court. But prosecutors argued that he could’ve flown to Brooklyn, shot Rush and then caught a flight back to Orlando. Jurors believed that version of events and convicted Fleming in July 1990.

Prosecutors also produced a key witness who told police she saw Fleming commit the murder. Shortly after Fleming’s sentencing, the witness recanted her statement, saying she lied to police to get cleared on unrelated charges. But a judge did not believe her statement, and Fleming remained in prison.

Fleming’s attorneys, Taylor Koss and Anthony Mayol, say they have evidence pointing to another man as the shooter.

Former Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes created the Conviction Integrity Unit after several questionable convictions resurfaced in recent years. But some attorneys said Hynes acted too slowly and defensively. Now, many are looking to Hynes’ successor, Kenneth Thompson, who campaigned on fighting false convictions, to take on the problem head-on.

Meanwhile, Fleming looks to adjusting to life outside of prison, after spending the past quarter century there.

“The day is finally here. I’ve dreamt about it many nights,” Jonathan Fleming said as he walked out of court. “I’m finally a free man.”

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials removed immigrant hunger strikers from solitary confinement Thursday, according to attorneys representing three of the detainees.

The move comes shortly after the American Civil Liberties Union Washington and Columbia Legal Services (CLS) filed a lawsuit claiming ICE officials placed the detainess in isolation cells in retaliation against their protest activities. The lawsuit argued that punishing inmates for staging a hunger strike violates their free speech rights.

“We’re very pleased that ICE has stopped retaliating against detainees engaged in peaceful protest. Punishing hunger strikers by putting them in isolation cells was an unlawful attempt to chill free speech rights,” said ACLU Washington Legal Director Sarah Dunne.

ICE officials denied that they acted in retaliation, claiming that the detainees placed in solitary had intimidated other inmates into joining the strike. “While ICE fully respects the rights of all people to express their opinion without interference, when these expressions infringe on the civil rights of others, ICE has an obligation to act,” the agency said in an email to the Associated Press.

More than twenty immigrant detainees were punished at Northwest Detainment Center in Tacoma for participating in the strike, said Melissa Lee, an attorney with CLS, who is representing three detainees.

Attorneys say prison officials called a March 27 meeting with hunger strikers, purportedly to discuss their protest demands. When about twenty detainees volunteered to attend, they were placed in handcuffs and moved to isolation cells, where they’ve been held for twenty-three hours a day since.

At least 750 detainees participated in the hunger strike, initiated March 7, to protest poor conditions at Northwest Detention Center, which is privately owned by GEO Group. Some detainees renewed the protest on March 24, demanding better food and an increased wage for prison jobs, currently set at one dollar a day.

“Basically this facility is run by the detainees. If we everybody stopped working, we could negotiate the pay raise because right now everyone’s working for a dollar,” said Hassall Moses, an Army veteran and detainee who is being held in solitary confinement, in a recorded interview. “We could talk about the quality of the food, the living conditions, and put into practice having detainees who come in with petty offenses be eligible to be released on their own personal recognizance or conditional parole or humanitarian parole to be with their families and to be working so they can afford their own attorneys.”

For more information on the hunger strike and conditions at Northwest Detention Center, see Rose Arrieta’s report for In These Times.

Texas Governor Rick Perry said in a letter that his state will not comply with some federal requirements intended to curb prison rape, the Associated Press reported.

In a March 28 letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Perry wrote that Texas will not be able to meet standards under the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), calling the law “a counterproductive and unnecessarily cumbersome and costly regulatory mess for the states.”

“The governor seems to be surrendering on issues of preventing sexual abuse in his state,” Chris Daley, Deputy Executive Director of Just Detention International, told The Nation. “It’s particularly alarming, given that Texas regularly shows up as one of the states with the worst rates of sexaul abuse in its prisons.”

Five of the ten US prisons with the highest rates of inmate-reported rapes are in Texas, according to a report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In two Texas prisons—Hughes Unit and Allred Unit—more than 7.6 percent of inmates reported being raped by another inmate, compared with 2.1 percent nationally.

President George W. Bush signed PREA in 2003, a landmark law that established a National Prison Rape Reduction Commission to conduct studies and put forth rules to eliminate prison rape. The commission’s rules, finalized in 2012, require prisons separate adult and juvenile inmates, stop cross-gender pat-downs of juveniles and restrict staff from viewing inmates of the opposite sex shower, change clothes or use the restroom.

Governor Perry claimed the cross-gender viewing provision would be impossible to implement, since women make up forty percent of Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDJC) correctional officers at all-male units. Perry also invoked states rights in objecting to a provision forcing prisons to stop treating seventeen-year-olds as adults, saying it would cost Texas too much.

Daley objects to Perry’s claim that the PREA rules were “created in a vacuum with little regard for input from those who daily operate state prisons and local jails.” In fact, Daley notes, the PREA commission held several hearings and public comment sessions with corrections officials as it developed its guidelines. TDCJ officials provided comments and letters of input throughout the process.

Lance Lowry, president of a local corrections officers union in Huntsville, told the AP that refusing to adopt PREA standards could open up TDJC and its staff to lawsuits, calling Perry’s letter “short-sighted.” Amy Fettig, Senior Staff Counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said Texas is willfully refusing to take measures that would certainly protect some prisoners from rape.

“If they refuse to implement PREA, what they’re essentially saying is ‘We don’t take protecting people from sexual abuse seriously,’” Fettig told The Nation. “This is opening up Texas to a huge liability. You can bet we’re going to watch it.”

Catholic hospital administrators ordered doctors practicing in a small Oklahoma city to stop prescribing contraceptives for birth control purposes, according to a report by the Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise.

The directive would affect all doctors affiliated with Jane Phillips Medical Center, leaving just one OB-GYN who can prescribe birth control in a city with more than 18,500 women.

A spokesperson for St. John Health System, which owns Jane Phillips, says St. John denies giving such an order.

“I was told that my physician has been instructed that they can no longer write prescriptions for birth control as birth control. This effects me because I take birth control as birth control. There are other ways to receive birth control, for example headaches, cramps, excessive bleeding — but I have none of those symptoms,” a local woman, who requested anonymity, told the Examiner-Enterprise.

Doctors were instructed to stop prescribing contraceptive for birth control during a closed-door meeting on Wednesday, according to the Examiner-Enterprise. St. John spokesperson Joy McGill would not comment on the alleged meeting.

Jane Phillips, like most Catholic hospitals, operates under the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Services, guidelines from the Church that bar doctors from “promoting or condoning” contraceptive practices. The Directives do not prohibit contraceptive prescriptions outright.

“While our physicians agree to abide by the Directives, they also have the ability to prescribe medications, including hormonal medications, in accordance with their independent professional medical judgment,” a St. John representative said in a statement.

The order to restrict contraceptives reportedly came from Ascension Health, a non-profit Catholic health services company that acquired St. John Health System in 2013. Women’s health advocates warn that the growing influence of Catholic health systems nationally bodes poorly for reproductive services, as seen in Bartlesville. According to a joint report by the American Civil Liberties Union and the MergerWatch Project, ten of the twenty-five largest hospital systems in 2011 were Catholic-sponsored.

Judges in Oklahoma and Texas ruled this week that prison officials must disclose the identities of lethal injection drug suppliers, two victories for transparency advocates in the growing legal battle contesting the veil of secrecy over execution procedures.

A Texas judge ordered on Thursday the state Department of Criminal Justice reveal the supplier of a new batch of lethal injection drugs, which are planned to be used to execute two inmates next month.

Just a day before, Oklahoma County District Judge Patricia Parrish ruled that a statute protecting execution drug suppliers' anonymity is unconstitutional. Parrish said the secrecy statute violates inmates' due process rights.

Judge Parrish’s ruling could further delay the executions of two Oklahoma inmates, Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner, both currently scheduled to die next month. The state already pushed back their execution dates once, after officials were unable to procure the necessary lethal injection drugs.

Since European pharmaceutical firms stopped selling drugs to prisons, citing objections to the death penalty, states have turned to shadier options to meet their capital punishment needs, including poorly-regulated compounding pharmacies. Attorneys for death row inmates say secrecy statutes make it impossible to know whether drugs procured from these suppliers meet standards commensurate with the constitution—that they won’t force inmates to endure cruel and unusual punishment.

The news from Oklahoma and Texas comes amid a recent wave of legal challenges related to anonymous execution drug suppliers. Earlier this month, a federal judge ordered Louisiana officials disclose the manufacturer and supplier of the state’s lethal injection drugs. And Georgia’s Supreme Court is considering a challenge to the state’s secrecy statute.

UPDATE (3/28/2014): Michelle Byrom was not executed on March 27. The Mississippi Supreme Court, which has the final word on executions, did not sign off on Attorney General Jim Hood's request for yesterday's execution date. “That means that the court is not going to set a date at this time,” said court spokesperson Beverly Kraft." The court is also reviewing a post-conviction motion, filed by Byrom's attorneys, to review new evidence in her case.

***

Mississippi could execute a mentally ill woman by lethal injection tomorrow, despite objections from legal experts and advocates saying she did not receive a fair trial, as well as evidence, unseen by the jury during trial, that places her guilt in doubt.

Michelle Byrom, 53, was sentenced to death in 2000 for plotting to murder her abusive husband, Edward Sr. Prosecutors said Michelle masterminded a plan with her son, Edward Jr., and his friend, Joey Gillis, to kill Edward Sr. and collect on his life insurance plan. According to this version of events, the one presented to a jury, Gillis fatally shot Edward Sr. as he slept in his bed on June 4, 1999. Edward Jr. found his dead father and called 911. Questioned by police, he copped to taking part of a conspiracy, orchestrated by his mother Michelle, to murder his father.

As several media outlets—including The Atlantic and the Jackson Free Press—have documented, there are serious holes in that story. The problem is jurors never saw key pieces of evidence casting doubt on Michelle’s guilt, including letters penned by her son confessing to the crime. On top of that, Michelle’s attorneys made several errors throughout her trial that had detrimental consequences on her fate.

Here’s a rundown of the most troubling aspects of Michelle’s case:

Michelle’s son Edward Byrom Jr. confessed multiple times to killing his father. The jury did not hear any of these confessions.

On four different occasions, Edward Jr. confessed that he, not Gillis, pulled the trigger on his father. Three of these confessions came by way of jailhouse letters, smuggled to his mother as she sat on death row. In one letter, Edward Jr. writes that he shot Edward Sr. in a fit of rage after his father hurled insults at him:

I sit in my room for a good 1 1/2-2 hours, and dad comes in my room, and goes off on me, calling me bastard, nogood, mistake, and telling me I'm inconciderate [sic] and just care about my self, and he slaps me, then goes back to his room.

As I sat on my bed, tears of rage flowing, remembering my childhood my anger kept building and building, and I went to my car, got the 9mm, and walked to his room, peeked in, and he was asleep. I walked about 2 steps in the door, and screamed, and shut my eyes, when I heard him move, I started firing. When I opened my eyes again, I freaked! I grabbed what casings I saw, and threw them into the bushes, grabbed the gun, and went to town.

Edward Jr. also admitted to killing his father in a statement given to a court-appointed psychologist. Trial judge Thomas Gardner, who sentenced Michelle to death, was made aware of this statement, according to the Jackson Free Press. But Gardner did not disclose the statement to jurors and also did not permit the confessional letters to be entered into evidence.

One of the key pieces of evidence presented at trial was a statement from Edward Jr. to police. In that statement, Edward Jr. laid out a conspiracy to kill his father, supposedly orchestrated by his mother Michelle and executed by his friend Gillis. But in a letter, Edward Jr. says he completely made up that story:

I was so scared, confused, and high, I just started spitting the first thought out, which turned into this big conspiracy thing, for money, which was all BS, that's why I had so many different stories.

This letter was not presented to jurors as evidence.

Michelle Byrom’s attorneys withheld evidence about her history with domestic abuse and mental illness.

Michelle Byrom had a long history of enduring sexual and domestic abuse. Her stepfather sexually abused her as a child and forced her to work as a prostitute. She entered her relationship with Edward Byrom when she was fifteen years old. He was thirty-one. According to court affidavits, Edward Sr. physically abused his wife and forced her to have sex with other men while he videotaped.

Dr. Keith A. Caruso, a psychiatrist who evaluated Michelle, linked her history of abuse to a long list of mental disorders that caused selfdestructive behavior. Caruso diagnosed her with depression, alcohol dependence, Borderline Personality Disorder and Münchausen syndrome. He wrote in a post-trial affidavit:

If I had been called to testify at the penalty phase of Michelle Byrom's trial, I would have offered the opinion that…she was inclined to harm herself and act in a self-defeating manner, so that she was psychologically unable to leave the abusive relationship with her husband.

Byrom’s attorneys mentioned her history with abuse and mental illness in their opening statement, but never called on Caruso to testify, believing his testimony would be more effective during an appeal.

Michelle Byrom’s attorneys gave her detrimental legal advice.

Michelle’s legal team, trying their first capital murder case, advised her to waive her right to a jury sentencing, erroneously assuming that it could be unconstitutional. That left her fate up to Judge Gardner, who sentenced her to death.

Michelle appealed to the state Supreme Court in 2006, on grounds that her attorneys were incompetent. The court rejected her appeal five to three. Dissenting Justice Jess Dickinson wrote, “I have attempted to conjure up in my imagination a more egregious case of ineffective assistance of counsel during the sentencing phase of a capital case," wrote in his dissent. "I cannot.”

***

Though Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood requested Michelle’s execution take place tomorrow, the Supreme Court still needs to give its stamp of approval to proceed.

It's unclear whether that will happen. What's clear is Michelle's advocates have laid out a compelling case that her trial was not carried out fairly. On top of that, key evidence suggests she could be innocent. An editorial, published in the Jackson Free Press last week, made clear what's at stake: “To execute Michelle Byrom for a crime that she did not commit would be one of the worst miscarriages of justices in modern Mississippi history."

Air pollution killed 7 million people worldwide in 2012, about one-in-eight of all deaths, according to new estimates released Tuesday by the World Health Organization.

That figure more than doubles previous estimates, making air pollution the single greatest environmental health risk today. WHO, the United Nations’ public health agency, linked outdoor air pollution to 3.7 million premature deaths in 2012. Indoor air pollution accounted for 4.3 million deaths that year.

Indoor air pollution primarily affects households that still use solid fuels for cooking and heating. The smoke produced from burning coal, wood or dung can lead to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.

“Poor women and children pay a heavy price from indoor air pollution since they spend more time at home breathing in smoke and soot from leaky coal and wood cook stoves,” said WHO Assistant Director Dr. Flavia Bustreo in a statement.

WHO linked deaths caused by outdoor air pollution to “unsustainable policies in sectors such as transport, waste management and industry.” The report urged policymakers to look towards cleaner options.

“In most cases, healthier strategies will also be more economical in the long term due to health-care cost savings as well as climate gains,” said WHO Coordinator for Public Health Dr Carlos Dora in a statement. “WHO and health sectors have a unique role in translating scientific evidence on air pollution into policies that can deliver impact and improvements that will save lives.”

Police shot James Boyd, 38, on March 16, after they tried to detain him for sleeping in an unauthorized area. Helmet camera footage shows Boyd finally cooperating after three hours of confrontation, picking up his belongings and approaching the officers, when one of the officers lobs a flashbang at his feet. Disoriented, Boyd appears to pull out two knives, makes a threatening gesture and then briefly turns his back to the officers. At that moment, two officers fire multiple live rounds at Boyd, hitting him at least once.

Boyd falls the ground. Blood can be seen on the rock above his head. He died at a hospital the next day.

But civil rights advocates and some city officials say the video clearly shows that Boyd’s death could have been avoided. Demonstrators are scheduled to protest the shooting tomorrow, with plans to march to Albuquerque's police headquarters.

"I am disturbed and I am troubled by what I saw,” said Albuquerque City Council president Ken Sanchez, “What alarms me the most is that the chief would come out so quickly and make comments that justify this shooting,"

The advocacy group ProgressNow New Mexico notes that this month’s shooting is just the latest in a long string of questionable use-of-force incidents involving APD officers. Albuquerque police have shot thirty-six people, twenty-three fatally, since 2010. In that time, police misconduct lawsuits have cost APD more than $24 million.

An ongoing Department of Justice probe seeks to “determine whether APD engages in a pattern or practice of use of excessive force in violation of the Constitution and federal law.” Council president Sanchez said Boyd’s case should be added to the DOJ’s investigation.